The White Man Blues

An AK-47 submachine gun shoots stammering, a rocket propelled grenade whooshes pastand I am in the middle of another country’s civil warshooting off short bursts, trying to stay alivewhile forced into military serviceby the governmentand this day could be my last, but it’s ok as I am still aliveand praying to an almighty God.

Having lost two cars, in less than a weekfrom theft by some black hooliganswho thinks that what you ownbelongs to themfrom which the insurance absolved themselves, having lost my job by affirmative actionand only receiving a few months salary as paywith all the fringe benefits being cut away

with the wife and her kids walking outinto the arms and the charmsof her new boyfriendand in Soweto and wherever the gangsters and politicians live, they know, they wait and try to relieve mefrom my humanityand to turn me into a ravenous hating thingand it isn’t news to them they see my plightas they are causing itand even the government holds out its handfor taxes when and where I have a contract workbut it’s ok as I am still aliveand praying to an almighty God.

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The Cassinga jump

Fear and tension was written over the facesof paratroopers next to, in front and at the back of mewhen the red light began to flash in the Herculesand we went to action stationsstill skimming barely over the topsof taller trees at about two hundred feetand most of us had two weeks earlierbeen home at our civilian jobs.

One paratrooper vomited right over me in yellow stinkinghalf fermented food and the retching smellmade me nauseas as wellwhile the aircraft pitched steeplywith its last-minute manoeuvrescoming to jumping height of eight hundred feet.

Mushroom clouds left by exploding bombsbillowed up from Cassingaand in trenches I sawpeople shooting upwards at usand suddenly bombers divedthrough our formation.

The sticks in front of me jumped and air rushed into my faceat the open doorwhile the pit of my stomach went numband I stepped into spacefalling, falling and seeing a rocket-propelled grenade explodingnear the aircraft above meand it veering away.

While the opening parachute jerked me upI heard the deep roarof a anti-aircraft gunshooting from belowand it was clear that wehad jumped laterthan we were supposed toor the dropping zone was too small to take a full stick of thirty-two paratroopers at a time.

We were dropping about five hundred meters farther souththan were we should have beenand a strong windwas driving from the northeast.

We landed in wooded terrainwhich made grouping very difficultand among the trees were drawing firebefore even touching down.

Immediately after hitting the groundI returned fireand the enemy fire became more sporadicand we assaulted the group of buildingsthat intelligence identified as the enemyengineer complex, running into groups of our own B and C companiesand for a time was shooting at each otherbefore realizing it was own forces.

We were just taking the engineer complexnow formed up with the other soldierswhen we came under rocket attackfrom RPG-7’sand had to kill the crew at a enemy B-10 recoilless gunwhere I threw several hand grenades

and then ammunition storesin the building complex started explodingbut only one paratrooper was woundedwhen we took up our stop-line positionsto block off the escape route lying south from Cassingaand the anti-tank platoon was sent awayto set up a tank ambushon the road running from Techamutete.

By this time I had picked up an enemyLMG and more than enoughammunition for itand shot from the hipat any movement that I sawand until then it had beeneasy as pie.

Then the commander of our companyleft some men at the stop-lineand about twenty of usalong with himwent to the enemy vehicle parkwhere we ran into a crowd of civiliansfleeing into the surrounding bushes.

I opened up with the LMGas we launched the attackin the direction of the lowered anti-aircraft gunsand we entered the trenches, finding some civilians there, but heavy fire came directlyfrom behind them.

It turned into a matter of killingor be killed and even the womenthat we met were armed and in enemy uniformand I lobbed hand grenadesinto the next leg of the trenchand kept firing from the hipand was splattered in bloodby a woman’s bodythat was blown right out of the parapetand what was left of herwas still in green fatiguesand blown to shreds.

Then I had nausea again, retching uncontrollablyand somehow I stared to crywith tears running downmy cheeks, but like a machine moved onseeing enemy soldiers scrambling from the trenchesto replace the ones killedat the three lowered anti-aircraft gunswith a bravery running nearto madness.

The closed quarter strugglewere worst than fierceand cruelly savageand we could only clearjust one leg of the zigzaggingditches at a timewith supporting fire helpingfrom the outside.

There were screaming and cryingwomen and children among the enemyand we had to kill or be killedand a chill ran through meand the noise was just terriblewith mortar bombs explodingat the anti-aircraft guns, shooting from almost any direction onto themand bullets ripping the wallsof the trench next to meand I almost choked in the smoke, dust and cordite fumes enveloping meand finally those trenches were clearedand the anti-aircraft guns stopped firing.

[References: LMG= Light machine gun. Read my poems Cassinga and Wings of destiny, for a full account of this battle and what happened when South African paratroopers faced enemy (Cuban) armour.]

Affirmative Action

I am not upset, Because they seem to apply quotas... To my existence.But the monthly statistics, And the cameramen in the backyard...Filming my every move, Can be overwhelming.

It's not that I am against affirmative action.It is the way it is done, That has me believing I 'am' different than everyone.And watched too closely! On a daily basis.And used to remind them of their superiority.

They claim they don't know enough about me.I guess they are referring to my skin color.And how that affords me all of the attention I get! As if that has anything to do with me being so loved? Envy has a way of producing conflict.

One thing is for sure...I am not rolling my eyes at the people on beach, Who already have my skin color.Nor am I trying to get darker...To look good or more healthy!

They've been trying to re-create that, In their laboratories.

Sick are those demented, Who weave these insecurities...Sick are those who expose their wickedness, And sit back to enjoy those of color bleed! And sick becomes a greatness believed...That sinks in obscurity! Left crazed to defend...An offensiveness felt, That angers one of a different colored skin! Or lack thereof.

Johnny Goes To War

At the age of eighteenjust after writing his final matriculation exam, Johnny is called up to do military serviceand when the pickup on the farmhave two flat tyresand Johnny cannot get to the station in time,

he is fetched by three broad shouldered military policemen who initially want to arrest himand shove him into a waiting military pickup van.

In the army he receives foodthat gives him stomach flueand for the first weekis almost stuck to the looand the mash potatoes coming from a packet as powder, runs into everything and has no salt in it

while the Colonel, the officersand non-commissioned officershave a feast in their mess, having roasted beef and chickenand eat as if they are truly blessed

and his hair is cut just above the scull, he’s forced into an overall, feels and looks like a criminalwhile the instructors, the officersand commanders wear normal uniforms

and he is chased up and down, has to run to some treesthree kilometres far and back, to bring a leaveand every time it’s not the right one

and the passing black citizensat the railway tracks and on the roadshake their headsand think that white men are nuts.

Day and night the instructor slanders and curses at him, he is put on duty to guard armoured cars and trucks, forced to run with poles and truck tyresand to be just like his fellow military men, even his girlfriend’s love letters, are read by the instructor to the rest of them

and he is given a rifle and taught to love it, while the instructor makes surethat he knows the differencebetween his rifle and his gun

he is forced to sleep with it like a fiancé while movement and fire tacticsis being drilled in, while life bullets whistle past himand a bit later he knows about hand grenades, mortars and rockets

and then he is shipped outby train, truck and helicopterto the war on the borderto meet the enemywho is waiting for him

and while on patrol with some Unitashe faces Cuban armour, a huge battle tankand fires a rocket propelled grenadeat point blank range straight at it

and the trooper next to him, looses his head, it’s blown offand Johnny is scared out of his wits, wishing to be deadbut forced into another firefight instead.

When after two years of being a soldierhe gets home Johnny is totally nuts, bomb happyand nobody knows himwhen to his mother, his girlfriend he is is somewhat strangewhile life in the town goes onlike it did before

and Johnny becomes a farmerand trusts in the Lord, cares for his cattle and sheepand not one night he can sleep right through, without having a nightmare

and the president PW Botha, his whole cabinet, the military officers have a great life, ignores his mothers letters, doesn’t care about her tears, about Johnny’s state of mind

and before longhe is called up for a military campand when he doesn’t appearhe is fetched by the military policeand sent back once more to war, to killing and death.

Metamorphoses: Book The Seventh

THE Argonauts now stemm'd the foaming tide,And to Arcadia's shore their course apply'd;Where sightless Phineus spent his age in grief,But Boreas' sons engage in his relief;And those unwelcome guests, the odious raceOf Harpyes, from the monarch's table chase.With Jason then they greater toils sustain,And Phasis' slimy banks at last they gain, Here boldly they demand the golden prizeOf Scythia's king, who sternly thus replies:That mighty labours they must first o'ercome, Or sail their Argo thence unfreighted home.The Story of Meanwhile Medea, seiz'd with fierce desire, Medea and By reason strives to quench the raging fire; Jason But strives in vain!- Some God (she said) withstands,And reason's baffl'd council countermands.What unseen Pow'r does this disorder move? 'Tis love,- at least 'tis like, what men call love. Else wherefore shou'd the king's commands appearTo me too hard?- But so indeed they are. Why shou'd I for a stranger fear, lest he Shou'd perish, whom I did but lately see? His death, or safety, what are they to me? Wretch, from thy virgin-breast this flame expel,And soon- Oh cou'd I, all wou'd then be well!But love, resistless love, my soul invades; Discretion this, affection that perswades.I see the right, and I approve it too, Condemn the wrong- and yet the wrong pursue. Why, royal maid, shou'dst thou desire to wedA wanderer, and court a foreign bed? Thy native land, tho' barb'rous, can presentA bridegroom worth a royal bride's content:And whether this advent'rer lives, or dies,In Fate, and Fortune's fickle pleasure lies. Yet may be live! for to the Pow'rs above,A virgin, led by no impulse of love, So just a suit may, for the guiltless, move. Whom wou'd not Jason's valour, youth and blood Invite? or cou'd these merits be withstood, At least his charming person must enclineThe hardest heart- I'm sure 'tis so with mine! Yet, if I help him not, the flaming breathOf bulls, and earth-born foes, must be his death. Or, should he through these dangers force his way, At last he must be made the dragon's prey. If no remorse for such distress I feel,I am a tigress, and my breast is steel. Why do I scruple then to see him slain,And with the tragick scene my eyes prophane?My magick's art employ, not to asswageThe Salvages, but to enflame their rage? His earth-born foes to fiercer fury move,And accessary to his murder prove?The Gods forbid- But pray'rs are idle breath,When action only can prevent his death. Shall I betray my father, and the state,To intercept a rambling hero's fate;Who may sail off next hour, and sav'd from harmsBy my assistance, bless another's arms? Whilst I, not only of my hopes bereft,But to unpity'd punishment am left. If he is false, let the ingrateful bleed!But no such symptom in his looks I read. Nature wou'd ne'er have lavish'd so much grace Upon his person, if his soul were base. Besides, he first shall plight his faith, and swearBy all the Gods; what therefore can'st thou fear? Medea haste, from danger set him free, Jason shall thy eternal debtor be.And thou, his queen, with sov'raign state enstall'd,By Graecian dames the Kind Preserver call'd. Hence idle dreams, by love-sick fancy bred! Wilt thou, Medea, by vain wishes led,To sister, brother, father bid adieu? Forsake thy country's Gods, and country too?My father's harsh, my brother but a child,My sister rivals me, my country's wild;And for its Gods, the greatest of 'em all Inspires my breast, and I obey his call.That great endearments I forsake, is true,But greater far the hopes that I pursue:The pride of having sav'd the youths of Greece (Each life more precious than our golden fleece);A nobler soil by me shall be possest,I shall see towns with arts and manners blest;And, what I prize above the world beside, Enjoy my Jason- and when once his bride,Be more than mortal, and to Gods ally'd.They talk of hazards I must first sustain,Of floating islands justling in the main; Our tender barque expos'd to dreadful shocksOf fierce Charybdis' gulf, and Scylla's rocks,Where breaking waves in whirling eddies rowl,And rav'nous dogs that in deep caverns howl: Amidst these terrors, while I lye possestOf him I love, and lean on Jason's breast,In tempests unconcern'd I will appear, Or, only for my husband's safety fear. Didst thou say husband?- canst thou so deceive Thy self, fond maid, and thy own cheat believe?In vain thou striv'st to varnish o'er thy shame,And grace thy guilt with wedlock's sacred name. Pull off the coz'ning masque, and oh! in time Discover and avoid the fatal crime. She ceas'd- the Graces now, with kind surprize,And virtue's lovely train, before her eyes Present themselves, and vanquish'd Cupid flies. She then retires to Hecate's shrine, that stood Far in the covert of a shady wood: She finds the fury of her flames asswag'd,But, seeing Jason there, again they rag'd. Blushes, and paleness did by turns invadeHer tender cheeks, and secret grief betray'd.As fire, that sleeping under ashes lyes, Fresh-blown, and rous'd, does up in blazes rise, So flam'd the virgin's breast-New kindled by her lover's sparkling eyes.For chance, that day, had with uncommon grace Adorn'd the lovely youth, and through his face Display'd an air so pleasing as might charmA Goddess, and a Vestal's bosom warm.Her ravish'd eyes survey him o'er and o'er,As some gay wonder never seen before; Transported to the skies she seems to be,And thinks she gazes on a deity.But when he spoke, and prest her trembling hand,And did with tender words her aid demand,With vows, and oaths to make her soon his bride, She wept a flood of tears, and thus reply'd:I see my error, yet to ruin move, Nor owe my fate to ignorance, but love: Your life I'll guard, and only crave of youTo swear once more- and to your oath be true. He swears by Hecate he would all fulfil,And by her grandfather's prophetick skill,By ev'ry thing that doubting love cou'd press, His present danger, and desir'd success. She credits him, and kindly does produce Enchanted herbs, and teaches him their use: Their mystick names, and virtues he admires,And with his booty joyfully retires.The Impatient for the wonders of the day, Dragon's Teeth Aurora drives the loyt'ring stars away. transform'd to Now Mars's mount the pressing people fill, Men The crowd below, the nobles crown the hill;The king himself high-thron'd above the rest,With iv'ry scepter, and in purple drest. Forthwith the brass-hoof'd bulls are set at large, Whose furious nostrils sulph'rous flame discharge:The blasted herbage by their breath expires;As forges rumble with excessive fires,And furnaces with fiercer fury glow,When water on the panting mass ye throw;With such a noise, from their convulsive breast, Thro' bellowing throats, the struggling vapour prest. Yet Jason marches up without concern,While on th' advent'rous youth the monsters turn Their glaring eyes, and, eager to engage, Brandish their steel-tipt horns in threatning rage:With brazen hoofs they beat the ground, and choakThe ambient air with clouds of dust and smoak: Each gazing Graecian for his champion shakes,While bold advances he securely makes Thro' sindging blasts; such wonders magick art Can work, when love conspires, and plays his part.The passive savages like statues stand,While he their dew-laps stroaks with soothing hand;To unknown yokes their brawny necks they yield,And, like tame oxen, plow the wond'ring field.The Colchians stare; the Graecians shout, and raise Their champion's courage with inspiring praise. Embolden'd now, on fresh attempts he goes,With serpent's teeth the fertile furrows sows;The glebe, fermenting with inchanted juice, Makes the snake's teeth a human crop produce.For as an infant, pris'ner to the womb, Contented sleeps, 'till to perfection come, Then does the cell's obscure confinement scorn, He tosses, throbs, and presses to be born; So from the lab'ring Earth no single birth,But a whole troop of lusty youths rush forth;And, what's more strange, with martial fury warm'd,And for encounter all compleatly arm'd;In rank and file, as they were sow'd, they stand, Impatient for the signal of command. No foe but the Aemonian youth appears; At him they level their steel-pointed spears; His frighted friends, who triumph'd, just before,With peals of sighs his desp'rate case deplore:And where such hardy warriors are afraid,What must the tender, and enamour'd maid?Her spirits sink, the blood her cheek forsook; She fears, who for his safety undertook: She knew the vertue of the spells she gave, She knew the force, and knew her lover brave;But what's a single champion to an host? Yet scorning thus to see him tamely lost,Her strong reserve of secret arts she brings,And last, her never-failing song she sings. Wonders ensue; among his gazing foesThe massy fragment of a rock he throws;This charm in civil war engag'd 'em all;By mutual wounds those Earth-born brothers fall.The Greeks, transported with the strange success, Leap from their seats the conqu'ror to caress; Commend, and kiss, and clasp him in their arms: So would the kind contriver of the charms;But her, who felt the tenderest concern, Honour condemns in secret flames to burn; Committed to a double guard of fame, Aw'd by a virgin's, and a princess' name.But thoughts are free, and fancy unconfin'd, She kisses, courts, and hugs him in her mind;To fav'ring Pow'rs her silent thanks she gives,By whose indulgence her lov'd hero lives. One labour more remains, and, tho' the last,In danger far surmounting all the past;That enterprize by Fates in store was kept,To make the dragon sleep that never slept, Whose crest shoots dreadful lustre; from his jawsA tripple tire of forked stings he draws,With fangs, and wings of a prodigious size: Such was the guardian of the golden prize. Yet him, besprinkled with Lethaean dew,The fair inchantress into slumber threw;And then, to fix him, thrice she did repeatThe rhyme, that makes the raging winds retreat,In stormy seas can halcyon seasons make,Turn rapid streams into a standing lake;While the soft guest his drowzy eye-lids seals, Th' ungarded golden fleece the stranger steals; Proud to possess the purchase of his toil, Proud of his royal bride, the richer spoil;To sea both prize, and patroness he bore,And lands triumphant on his native shore. Old Aeson Aemonian matrons, who their absence mourn'd, restor'd to Rejoyce to see their prosp'rous sons return'd: Youth Rich curling fumes of incense feast the skies,An hecatomb of voted victims dies,With gilded horns, and garlands on their head,And all the pomp of death, to th' altar led. Congratulating bowls go briskly round, Triumphant shouts in louder musick drown'd. Amidst these revels, why that cloud of care On Jason's brow? (to whom the largest shareOf mirth was due)- His father was not there. Aeson was absent, once the young, and brave, Now crush'd with years, and bending to the grave. At last withdrawn, and by the crowd unseen, Pressing her hand (with starting sighs between), He supplicates his kind, and skilful queen. O patroness! preserver of my life! (Dear when my mistress, and much dearer wife) Your favours to so vast a sum amount, 'Tis past the pow'r of numbers to recount; Or cou'd they be to computation brought,The history would a romance be thought:And yet, unless you add one favour more, Greater than all that you conferr'd before,But not too hard for love and magick skill, Your past are thrown away, and Jason's wretchedstill.The morning of my life is just begun,But my declining father's race is run;From my large stock retrench the long arrears,And add 'em to expiring Aeson's years. Thus spake the gen'rous youth, and wept the rest. Mov'd with the piety of his request,To his ag'd sire such filial duty shown, So diff'rent from her treatment of her own,But still endeav'ring her remorse to hide, She check'd her rising sighs, and thus reply'd. How cou'd the thought of such inhuman wrong Escape (said she) from pious Jason's tongue? Does the whole world another Jason bear, Whose life Medea can to yours prefer? Or cou'd I with so dire a change dispence, Hecate will never join in that offence: Unjust is the request you make, and IIn kindness your petition shall deny; Yet she that grants not what you do implore, Shall yet essay to give her Jason more; Find means t' encrease the stock of Aeson's years, Without retrenchment of your life's arrears; Provided that the triple Goddess joinA strong confed'rate in my bold design. Thus was her enterprize resolv'd; but still Three tedious nights are wanting to fulfilThe circling crescents of th' encreasing moon; Then, in the height of her nocturnal noon, Medea steals from court; her ankles bare,Her garments closely girt, but loose her hair; Thus sally'd, like a solitary sprite, She traverses the terrors of the night. Men, beasts, and birds in soft repose lay charm'd, No boistrous wind the mountain-woods alarm'd; Nor did those walks of love, the myrtle-trees,Of am'rous Zephir hear the whisp'ring breeze;All elements chain'd in unactive rest, No sense but what the twinkling stars exprest;To them (that only wak'd) she rears her arm,And thus commences her mysterious charms. She turn'd her thrice about, as oft she threw On her pale tresses the nocturnal dew; Then yelling thrice a most enormous sound,Her bare knee bended on the flinty ground. O night (said she) thou confident and guideOf secrets, such as darkness ought to hide; Ye stars and moon, that, when the sun retires, Support his empire with succeeding fires;And thou, great Hecate, friend to my design; Songs, mutt'ring spells, your magick forces join;And thou, O Earth, the magazine that yieldsThe midnight sorcerer drugs; skies, mountains, fields; Ye wat'ry Pow'rs of fountain, stream, and lake; Ye sylvan Gods, and Gods of night, awake,And gen'rously your parts in my adventure take. Oft by your aid swift currents I have led Thro' wand'ring banks, back to their fountain head; Transformed the prospect of the briny deep, Made sleeping billows rave, and raving billows sleep; Made clouds, or sunshine; tempests rise, or fall;And stubborn lawless winds obey my call:With mutter'd words disarm'd the viper's jaw; Up by the roots vast oaks, and rocks cou'd draw, Make forests dance, and trembling mountains come, Like malefactors, to receive their doom; Earth groan, and frighted ghosts forsake their tomb. Thee, Cynthia, my resistless rhymes drew down,When tinkling cymbals strove my voice to drown; Nor stronger Titan could their force sustain,In full career compell'd to stop his wain: Nor could Aurora's virgin blush avail,With pois'nous herbs I turn'd her roses pale;The fury of the fiery bulls I broke, Their stubborn necks submitting to my yoke;And when the sons of Earth with fury burn'd, Their hostile rage upon themselves I turn'd;The brothers made with mutual wounds to bleed,And by their fatal strife my lover freed;And, while the dragon slept, to distant Greece, Thro' cheated guards, convey'd the golden fleece.But now to bolder action I proceed,Of such prevailing juices now have need,That wither'd years back to their bloom can bring,And in dead winter raise a second spring.And you'll perform't-You will; for lo! the stars, with sparkling fires, Presage as bright success to my desires:And now another happy omen see!A chariot drawn by dragons waits for me.With these last words he leaps into the wain, Stroaks the snakes' necks, and shakes the golden rein;That signal giv'n, they mount her to the skies,And now beneath her fruitful Tempe lies, Whose stories she ransacks, then to Crete she flies; There Ossa, Pelion, Othrys, Pindus, allTo the fair ravisher, a booty fall;The tribute of their verdure she collects, Nor proud Olympus' height his plants protects.Some by the roots she plucks; the tender topsOf others with her culling sickle crops. Nor could the plunder of the hills suffice, Down to the humble vales, and meads she flies; Apidanus, Amphrysus, the next rape Sustain, nor could Enipeus' bank escape; Thro' Beebe's marsh, and thro' the border rang'd Whose pasture Glaucus to a Triton chang'd. Now the ninth day, and ninth successive night, Had wonder'd at the restless rover's flight; Mean-while her dragons, fed with no repast,But her exhaling simples od'rous blast, Their tarnish'd scales, and wrinkled skins had cast. At last return'd before her palace gate, Quitting her chariot, on the ground she sate;The sky her only canopy of state.All conversation with her sex she fled, Shun'd the caresses of the nuptial bed:Two altars next of grassy turf she rears,This Hecate's name, that Youth's inscription bears;With forest-boughs, and vervain these she crown'd; Then delves a double trench in lower ground,And sticks a black-fleec'd ram, that ready stood,And drench'd the ditches with devoted blood:New wine she pours, and milk from th' udder warm,With mystick murmurs to compleat the charm,And subterranean deities alarm.To the stern king of ghosts she next apply'd,And gentle Proserpine, his ravish'd bride,That for old Aeson with the laws of FateThey would dispense, and lengthen his short date; Thus with repeated pray'rs she long assails Th' infernal tyrant and at last prevails; Then calls to have decrepit Aeson brought,And stupifies him with a sleeping draught; On Earth his body, like a corpse, extends, Then charges Jason and his waiting friendsTo quit the place, that no unhallow'd eyeInto her art's forbidden secrets pry.This done, th' inchantress, with her locks unbound, About her altars trips a frantick round; Piece-meal the consecrated wood she splits,And dips the splinters in the bloody pits, Then hurles 'em on the piles; the sleeping sire She lustrates thrice, with sulphur, water, fire.In a large cauldron now the med'cine boils, Compounded of her late-collected spoils, Blending into the mesh the various pow'rsOf wonder-working juices, roots, and flow'rs;With gems i' th' eastern ocean's cell refin'd,And such as ebbing tides had left behind;To them the midnight's pearly dew she flings,A scretch-owl's carcase, and ill boding wings; Nor could the wizard wolf's warm entrails scape (That wolf who counterfeits a human shape). Then, from the bottom of her conj'ring bag, Snakes' skins, and liver of a long-liv'd stag;Last a crow's head to such an age arriv'd,That he had now nine centuries surviv'd; These, and with these a thousand more that grewIn sundry soils, into her pot she threw; Then with a wither'd olive-bough she rakesThe bubling broth; the bough fresh verdure takes; Green leaves at first the perish'd plant surround,Which the next minute with ripe fruit were crown'd.The foaming juices now the brink o'er-swell;The barren heath, where-e'er the liquor fell, Sprang out with vernal grass, and all the prideOf blooming May- When this Medea spy'd, She cuts her patient's throat; th' exhausted blood Recruiting with her new enchanted flood;While at his mouth, and thro' his op'ning wound,A double inlet her infusion found; His feeble frame resumes a youthful air,A glossy brown his hoary beard and hair.The meager paleness from his aspect fled,And in its room sprang up a florid red; Thro' all his limbs a youthful vigour flies, His empty'd art'ries swell with fresh supplies: Gazing spectators scarce believe their eyes.But Aeson is the most surpriz'd to findA happy change in body and in mind;In sense and constitution the same man,As when his fortieth active year began. Bacchus, who from the clouds this wonder view'd, Medea's method instantly pursu'd,And his indulgent nurse's youth renew'd.The Death of Thus far obliging love employ'd her art, Pelias But now revenge must act a tragick part; Medea feigns a mortal quarrel bred Betwixt her, and the partner of her bed; On this pretence to Pelias' court she flies,Who languishing with age and sickness lies: His guiltless daughters, with inveigling wiles,And well dissembled friendship, she beguiles:The strange achievements of her art she tells,With Aeson's cure, and long on that she dwells, 'Till them to firm perswasion she has won,The same for their old father may be done:For him they court her to employ her skill,And put upon the cure what price she will. At first she's mute, and with a grave pretenceOf difficulty, holds 'em in suspense; Then promises, and bids 'em, from the fold Chuse out a ram, the most infirm and old;That so by fact their doubts may be remov'd,And first on him the operation prov'd.A wreath-horn'd ram is brought, so far o'er-grownWith years, his age was to that age unknownOf sense too dull the piercing point to feel,And scarce sufficient blood to stain the steel. His carcass she into a cauldron threw,With drugs whose vital qualities she knew; His limbs grow less, he casts his horns, and years,And tender bleatings strike their wond'ring ears. Then instantly leaps forth a frisking lamb,That seeks (too young to graze) a suckling dam.The sisters, thus confirm'd with the success,Her promise with renew'd entreaty press;To countenance the cheat, three nights and days Before experiment th' inchantress stays; Then into limpid water, from the springs, Weeds, and ingredients of no force she flings;With antique ceremonies for pretenceAnd rambling rhymes without a word of sense. Mean-while the king with all his guards lay boundIn magick sleep, scarce that of death so sound;The daughters now are by the sorc'ress ledInto his chamber, and surround his bed. Your father's health's concern'd, and can ye stay? Unnat'ral nymphs, why this unkind delay? Unsheath your swords, dismiss his lifeless blood,And I'll recruit it with a vital flood: Your father's life and health is in your hand,And can ye thus like idle gazers stand? Unless you are of common sense bereft, If yet one spark of piety is left, Dispatch a father's cure, and disengageThe monarch from his toilsome load of age: Come- drench your weapons in his putrid gore; 'Tis charity to wound, when wounding will restore. Thus urg'd, the poor deluded maids proceed, Betray'd by zeal, to an inhumane deed,And, in compassion, make a father bleed. Yes, she who had the kindest, tend'rest heart, Is foremost to perform the bloody part. Yet, tho' to act the butchery betray'd,They could not bear to see the wounds they made;With looks averted, backward they advance, Then strike, and stab, and leave the blows to chance. Waking in consternation, he essays (Weltring in blood) his feeble arms to raise: Environ'd with so many swords- From whenceThis barb'rous usage? what is my offence?What fatal fury, what infernal charm, 'Gainst a kind father does his daughters arm? Hearing his voice, as thunder-struck they stopt, Their resolution, and their weapons dropt: Medea then the mortal blow bestows,And that perform'd, the tragick scene to close, His corpse into the boiling cauldron throws. Then, dreading the revenge that must ensue, High mounted on her dragon-coach she flew;And in her stately progress thro' the skies, Beneath her shady Pelion first she spies,With Othrys, that above the clouds did rise;With skilful Chiron's cave, and neighb'ring ground,For old Cerambus' strange escape renown'd,By nymphs deliver'd, when the world was drown'd;Who him with unexpected wings supply'd,When delug'd hills a safe retreat deny'd. Aeolian Pitane on her left hand She saw, and there the statu'd dragon stand;With Ida's grove, where Bacchus, to disguise His son's bold theft, and to secure the prize, Made the stoln steer a stag to represent; Cocytus' father's sandy monument;And fields that held the murder'd sire's remains,Where howling Moera frights the startled plains. Euryphilus' high town, with tow'rs defac'dBy Hercules, and matrons more disgrac'dWith sprouting horns, in signal punishment,From Juno, or resenting Venus sent. Then Rhodes, which Phoebus did so dearly prize,And Jove no less severely did chastize;For he the wizard native's pois'ning sight,That us'd the farmer's hopeful crops to blight,In rage o'erwhelm'd with everlasting night. Cartheia's ancient walls come next in view,Where once the sire almost a statue grewWith wonder, which a strange event did move, His daughter turn'd into a turtle-dove. Then Hyrie's lake, and Tempe's field o'er-ran, Fam'd for the boy who there became a swan;For there enamour'd Phyllius, like a slave, Perform'd what tasks his paramour would crave.For presents he had mountain-vultures caught,And from the desart a tame lion brought; Then a wild bull commanded to subdue,The conquer'd savage by the horns he drew;But, mock'd so oft, the treatment he disdains,And from the craving boy this prize detains. Then thus in choler the resenting lad: Won't you deliver him?- You'll wish you had: Nor sooner said, but, in a peevish mood, Leapt from the precipice on which he stood:The standers-by were struck with fresh surprize, Instead of falling, to behold him riseA snowy swan, and soaring to the skies.But dearly the rash prank his mother cost,Who ignorantly gave her son for lost;For his misfortune wept, 'till she becameA lake, and still renown'd with Hyrie's name. Thence to Latona's isle, where once were seen, Transform'd to birds, a monarch, and his queen. Far off she saw how old Cephisus mourn'd His son, into a seele by Phoebus turn'd;And where, astonish'd at a stranger sight, Eumelus gaz'd on his wing'd daughter's flight. Aetolian Pleuron she did next survey,Where sons a mother's murder did essay,But sudden plumes the matron bore away. On her right hand, Cyllene, a fair soil, Fair, 'till Menephron there the beauteous hill Attempted with foul incest to defile.Her harness'd dragons now direct she drivesFor Corinth, and at Corinth she arrives;Where, if what old tradition tells, be true,In former ages men from mushrooms grew.But here Medea finds her bed supply'd, During her absence, by another bride;And hopeless to recover her lost game, She sets both bride and palace in a flame. Nor could a rival's death her wrath asswage, Nor stopt at Creon's family her rage, She murders her own infants, in despightTo faithless Jason, and in Jason's sight; Yet e'er his sword could reach her, up she springs, Securely mounted on her dragon's wings.The Story of From hence to Athens she directs her flight, Aegeus Where Phineus, so renown'd for doing right;Where Periphas, and Polyphemon's neece, Soaring with sudden plumes amaz'd the towns of Greece. Here Aegeus so engaging she addrest,That first he treats her like a royal guest; Then takes the sorc'ress for his wedded wife;The only blemish of his prudent life. Mean-while his son, from actions of renown, Arrives at court, but to his sire unknown. Medea, to dispatch a dang'rous heir (She knew him), did a pois'nous draught prepare; Drawn from a drug, was long reserv'd in storeFor desp'rate uses, from the Scythian shore;That from the Echydnaean monster's jaws Deriv'd its origin, and this the cause. Thro' a dark cave a craggy passage lies,To ours, ascending from the nether skies; Thro' which, by strength of hand, Alcides drew Chain'd Cerberus, who lagg'd, and restive grew,With his blear'd eyes our brighter day to view. Thrice he repeated his enormous yell,With which he scares the ghosts, and startles Hell; At last outragious (tho' compell'd to yield) He sheds his foam in fury on the field,-Which, with its own, and rankness of the ground, Produc'd a weed, by sorcerers renown'd,The strongest constitution to confound; Call'd Aconite, because it can unlockAll bars, and force its passage thro' a rock.The pious father, by her wheedles won, Presents this deadly potion to his son;Who, with the same assurance takes the cup,And to the monarch's health had drank it up,But in the very instant he apply'dThe goblet to his lips, old Aegeus spy'dThe iv'ry hilted sword that grac'd his side.That certain signal of his son he knew,And snatcht the bowl away; the sword he drew, Resolv'd, for such a son's endanger'd life,To sacrifice the most perfidious wife. Revenge is swift, but her more active charmsA whirlwind rais'd, that snatch'd her from hisarms.While conjur'd clouds their baffled sense surprize, She vanishes from their deluded eyes,And thro' the hurricane triumphant flies.The gen'rous king, altho' o'er-joy'd to find His son was safe, yet bearing still in mindThe mischief by his treach'rous queen design'd;The horrour of the deed, and then how nearThe danger drew, he stands congeal'd with fear.But soon that fear into devotion turns,With grateful incense ev'ry altar burns; Proud victims, and unconscious of their fate, Stalk to the temple, there to die in state.In Athens never had a day been foundFor mirth, like that grand festival, renown'd. Promiscuously the peers, and people dine, Promiscuously their thankful voices join,In songs of wit, sublim'd by spritely wine.To list'ning spheres their joint applause they raise,And thus resound their matchless Theseus' praise. Great Theseus! Thee the Marathonian plain Admires, and wears with pride the noble stainOf the dire monster's blood, by valiant Theseus slain.That now Cromyon's swains in safety sow,And reap their fertile field, to thee they owe.By thee th' infested Epidaurian coast Was clear'd, and now can a free commerce boast.The traveller his journey can pursue,With pleasure the late dreadful valley view,And cry, Here Theseus the grand robber slew. Cephysus' cries to his rescu'd shore,The merciless Procrustes is no more.In peace, Eleusis, Ceres' rites renew, Since Theseus' sword the fierce Cercyon slew.By him the tort'rer Sinis was destroy'd,Of strength (but strength to barb'rous use employ'd)That tops of tallest pines to Earth could bend,And thus in pieces wretched captives rend. Inhuman Scyron now has breath'd his last,And now Alcatho's roads securely past;By Theseus slain, and thrown into the deep:But Earth nor Sea his scatter'd bones wou'd keep,Which, after floating long, a rock became,Still infamous with Scyron's hated name.When Fame to count thy acts and years proceeds, Thy years appear but cyphers to thy deeds.For thee, brave youth, as for our common-wealth, We pray; and drink, in yours, the publick health. Your praise the senate, and plebeians sing,With your lov'd name the court, and cottage ring.You make our shepherds and our sailors glad,And not a house in this vast city's sad.But mortal bliss will never come sincere, Pleasure may lead, but grief brings up the rear;While for his sons' arrival, rev'ling joy Aegeus, and all his subjects does employ;While they for only costly feasts prepare, His neighb'ring monarch, Minos, threatens war: Weak in land-forces, nor by sea more strong,But pow'rful in a deep resented wrongFor a son's murder, arm'd with pious rage; Yet prudently before he would engage,To raise auxiliaries resolv'd to sail,And with the pow'rful princes to prevail. First Anaphe, then proud Astypalaea gains,By presents that, and this by threats obtains: Low Mycone, Cymolus, chalky soil, Tall Cythnos, Scyros, flat Seriphos' isle; Paros, with marble cliffs afar display'd; Impregnable Sithonia; yet betray'dTo a weak foe by a gold-admiring maid,Who, chang'd into a daw of sable hue,Still hoards up gold, and hides it from the view.But as these islands chearfully combine, Others refuse t' embark in his design. Now leftward with an easy sail he bore,And prosp'rous passage to Oenopia's shore; Oenopia once, but now Aegina call'd,And with his royal mother's name install'dBy Aeacus, under whose reign did springThe Myrmidons, and now their reigning king. Down to the port, amidst the rabble, runThe princes of the blood; with Telamon, Peleus the next, and Phocus the third son: Then Aeacus, altho' opprest with years,To ask the cause of their approach appears.That question does the Gnossian's grief renew,And sighs from his afflicted bosom drew; Yet after a short solemn respite made,The ruler of the hundred cities said: Assist our arms, rais'd for a murder'd son,In this religious war no risque you'll run: Revenge the dead- for who refuse to give Rest to their urns, unworthy are to live.What you request, thus Aeacus replies, Not I, but truth and common faith denies; Athens and we have long been sworn allies: Our leagues are fix'd, confed'rate are our pow'rs,And who declare themselves their foes, are ours. Minos rejoins, Your league shall dearly cost (Yet, mindful how much safer 'twas to boast,Than there to waste his forces, and his fame, Before in field with his grand foe he came), Parts without blows- nor long had left the shore, E're into port another navy bore,With Cephalus, and all his jolly crew; Th' Aeacides their old acquaintance knew:The princes bid him welcome, and in state Conduct the heroe to their palace gate;Who entr'ring, seem'd the charming mein to wear,As when in youth he paid his visit there.In his right hand an olive-branch he holds,And, salutation past, the chief unfolds His embassy from the Athenian state, Their mutual friendship, leagues of ancient date; Their common danger, ev'ry thing cou'd wake Concern, and his address successful make: Strength'ning his plea with all the charms of sense,And those, with all the charms of eloquence. Then thus the king: Like suitors do you standFor that assistance which you may command? Athenians, all our listed forces use (They're such as no bold service will refuse);And when y' ave drawn them off, the Gods be prais'd, Fresh legions can within our isle be rais'd: So stock'd with people, that we can prepare Both for domestick, and for distant war, Ours, or our friends' insulters to chastize. Long may ye flourish thus, the prince replies. Strange transport seiz'd me as I pass'd along,To meet so many troops, and all so young,As if your army did of twins consist; Yet amongst them my late acquaintance miss'd: Ev'n all that to your palace did resort,When first you entertain'd me at your court;And cannot guess the cause from whence cou'd spring So vast a change- Then thus the sighing king: Illustrious guest, to my strange tale attend,Of sad beginning, but a joyful end:The whole to a vast history wou'd swell,I shall but half, and that confus'dly, tell.That race whom so deserv'dly you admir'd,Are all into their silent tombs retir'd:They fell; and falling, how they shook my state, Thought may conceive, but words can ne'er relate.The Story of A dreadful plague from angry Juno came, Ants chang'd To scourge the land, that bore her rival's name;to Men Before her fatal anger was reveal'd,And teeming malice lay as yet conceal'd,All remedies we try, all med'cines use,Which Nature cou'd supply, or art produce; Th' unconquer'd foe derides the vain design,And art, and Nature foil'd, declare the cause divine. At first we only felt th' oppressive weightOf gloomy clouds, then teeming with our fate,And lab'ring to discarge unactive heat:But ere four moons alternate changes knew,With deadly blasts the fatal South-wind blew, Infected all the air, and poison'd as it flew. Our fountains too a dire infection yield,For crowds of vipers creep along the field,And with polluted gore, and baneful steams, Taint all the lakes, and venom all the streams.The young disease with milder force began,And rag'd on birds, and beasts, excusing Man.The lab'ring oxen fall before the plow, Th' unhappy plow-men stare, and wonder how:The tabid sheep, with sickly bleatings, pines;Its wool decreasing, as its strength declines:The warlike steed, by inward foes compell'd, Neglects his honours, and deserts the field; Unnerv'd, and languid, seeks a base retreat,And at the manger groans, but wish'd a nobler fate:The stags forget their speed, the boars their rage, Nor can the bears the stronger herds engage:A gen'ral faintness does invade 'em all,And in the woods, and fields, promiscuously they fall.The air receives the stench, and (strange to say)The rav'nous birds and beasts avoid the prey: Th' offensive bodies rot upon the ground,And spread the dire contagion all around.But now the plague, grown to a larger size, Riots on Man, and scorns a meaner prize. Intestine heats begin the civil war,And flushings first the latent flame declare,And breath inspir'd, which seem'd like fiery air. Their black dry tongues are swell'd, and scarce can move,And short thick sighs from panting lung are drove.They gape for air, with flatt'ring hopes t' abate Their raging flames, but that augments their heat. No bed, no cov'ring can the wretches bear,But on the ground, expos'd to open air,They lye, and hope to find a pleasing coolness there.The suff'ring Earth with that oppression curst, Returns the heat which they imparted first.In vain physicians would bestow their aid, Vain all their art, and useless all their trade;And they, ev'n they, who fleeting life recall, Feel the same Pow'rs, and undistinguish'd fall. If any proves so daring to attend His sick companion, or his darling friend, Th' officious wretch sucks in contagious breath,And with his friend does sympathize in death.And now the care and hopes of life are past,They please their fancies, and indulge their taste; At brooks and streams, regardless of their shame, Each sex, promiscuous, strives to quench their flame; Nor do they strive in vain to quench it there,For thirst, and life at once extinguish'd are. Thus in the brooks the dying bodies sink,But heedless still the rash survivors drink. So much uneasy down the wretches hate,They fly their beds, to struggle with their fate;But if decaying strength forbids to rise,The victim crawls and rouls, 'till on the ground he lies. Each shuns his bed, as each wou'd shun his tomb,And thinks th' infection only lodg'd at home. Here one, with fainting steps, does slowly creep O'er heaps of dead, and strait augments the heap;Another, while his strength and tongue prevail'd, Bewails his friend, and falls himself bewail'd:This with imploring looks surveys the skies,The last dear office of his closing eyes,But finds the Heav'ns implacable, and dies.What now, ah! what employ'd my troubled mind?But only hopes my subjects' fate to find.What place soe'er my weeping eyes survey, There in lamented heaps the vulgar lay;As acorns scatter when the winds prevail, Or mellow fruit from shaken branches fall.You see that dome which rears its front so high: 'Tis sacred to the monarch of the sky: How many there, with unregarded tears,And fruitless vows, sent up successless pray'rs? There fathers for expiring sons implor'd,And there the wife bewail'd her gasping lord;With pious off'rings they'd appease the skies,But they, ere yet th' attoning vapours rise, Before the altars fall, themselves a sacrifice:They fall, while yet their hands the gums contain,The gums surviving, but their off'rers slain.The destin'd ox, with holy garlands crown'd, Prevents the blow, and feels th' expected wound:When I my self invok'd the Pow'rs divine,To drive the fatal pest from me and mine;When now the priest with hands uplifted stood, Prepar'd to strike, and shed the sacred blood,The Gods themselves the mortal stroke bestow,The victim falls, but they impart the blow: Scarce was the knife with the pale purple stain'd,And no presages cou'd be then obtain'd,From putrid entrails, where th' infection reign'd. Death stalk'd around with such resistless sway,The temples of the Gods his force obey,And suppliants feel his stroke, while yet they pray. Go now, said he, your deities imploreFor fruitless aid, for I defie their pow'r. Then with a curst malicious joy survey'dThe very altars, stain'd with trophies of the dead.The rest grown mad, and frantick with despair, Urge their own fate, and so prevent the fear. Strange madness that, when Death pursu'd so fast,T' anticipate the blow with impious haste. No decent honours to their urns are paid, Nor cou'd the graves receive the num'rous dead;For, or they lay unbury'd on the ground, Or unadorn'd a needy fun'ral found:All rev'rence past, the fainting wretches fightFor fun'ral piles which were another's right. Unmourn'd they fall: for, who surviv'd to mourn?And sires, and mothers unlamented burn: Parents, and sons sustain an equal fate,And wand'ring ghosts their kindred shadows meet.The dead a larger space of ground require, Nor are the trees sufficient for the fire. Despairing under grief's oppressive weight,And sunk by these tempestuous blasts of Fate, O Jove, said I, if common fame says true, If e'er Aegina gave those joys to you, If e'er you lay enclos'd in her embrace, Fond of her charms, and eager to possess; O father, if you do not yet disclaim Paternal care, nor yet disown the name; Grant my petitions, and with speed restoreMy subjects num'rous as they were before, Or make me partner of the fate they bore.I spoke, and glorious lightning shone around,And ratling thunder gave a prosp'rous sound; So let it be, and may these omens proveA pledge, said I, of your returning love.By chance a rev'rend oak was near the place, Sacred to Jove, and of Dodona's race,Where frugal ants laid up their winter meat, Whose little bodies bear a mighty weight: We saw them march along, and hide their store,And much admir'd their number, and their pow'r; Admir'd at first, but after envy'd more. Full of amazement, thus to Jove I pray'd, O grant, since thus my subjects are decay'd,As many subjects to supply the dead.I pray'd, and strange convulsions mov'd the oak,Which murmur'd, tho' by ambient winds unshook:My trembling hands, and stiff-erected hair, Exprest all tokens of uncommon fear; Yet both the earth and sacred oak I kist,And scarce cou'd hope, yet still I hop'd the best;For wretches, whatsoe'er the Fates divine, Expound all omens to their own design.But now 'twas night, when ev'n distraction wearsA pleasing look, and dreams beguile our cares, Lo! the same oak appears before my eyes,

Cassinga

Just like spring when the blue sky is full of falling leaves, there are three hundred and seventy parachutes that decent, on a ominous daywith enemy AA-guns reportingand the enemy are more than a thousand and a half in number.

The barrels of the enemy AA-guns are lowered, to break us and the enemy tries to sow havoc and to decimate us.

Enemy snipers are shooting from treesand from everywhere there are shots being fired, that munches pieces from us

From behind ruinswe fire almost endlessly at trenches where some enemy soldiers hide and launch mortar bombs all over the place, while bullets are coming down like rain.

We return heavy fire to the enemy at the AA-guns, while other soldiers replace themwhich keeps the battle hanging in balance

Shot after shot are being firedand the smell of deathis strong in the airand there’s nowhere for the enemy to escape to.

The last resistance disappearsand there’s apparent peaceand dead enemies everywhereand some of the bats, get into pumas and the rest of us waitwith nowhere to go.

The border is too far to walkand there’s nothing to drive away with, when Cuban tanks and armoured carsfind us there..With RPG-7 iron fists four tanks are destroyedand a landmine stops another tank in its tracks, but only paratroops against oncoming armourare canon feed and nothing diminishes the dangerof a Cuban mechanized battalion.

About The Father

the father fell down from the second floorbroke a leg and tore his anklecrawling his way in the middle of the suffocating smokehe heard the criesof the boyand yet the cruel tongues of the devilsnatched away what it thinks belongsto it on such a horrorthere is no peace nowthe ash still want to tell the storiesof the tragedy

Thank God

Thank God the democrats want our children from the middle class to go to school by reasonable loans in pell grants not just the rich, thank God no pre-existing conditions will be denied by insurance companies; thank God veterans will be honored in deed not just swelling words; thank God no trickle down clean the rich's toilets policy will be enacted. Romney/ Ryan's vision for America is cold so so cold. We must stop them and not let them define what rape is and step on women with a dark age vision of sexist chauvinistic lies. Their shills for the rich and true oppressors of the poor and middle class. Vote for democrats based on principle not personality so their evil cold vision of America doesn't come true.

I. The Ring and the Book

Do you see this Ring?'T is Rome-work, made to match(By Castellani's imitative craft)Etrurian circlets found, some happy morn,After a dropping April; found aliveSpark-like 'mid unearthed slope-side figtree-rootsThat roof old tombs at Chiusi: soft, you see,Yet crisp as jewel-cutting. There's one trick,(Craftsmen instruct me) one approved deviceAnd but one, fits such slivers of pure goldAs this was,—such mere oozings from the mine,Virgin as oval tawny pendent tearAt beehive-edge when ripened combs o'erflow,—To bear the file's tooth and the hammer's tap:Since hammer needs must widen out the round,And file emboss it fine with lily-flowers,Ere the stuff grow a ring-thing right to wear.That trick is, the artificer melts up waxWith honey, so to speak; he mingles goldWith gold's alloy, and, duly tempering both,Effects a manageable mass, then works:But his work ended, once the thing a ring,Oh, there's repristination! Just a spirtO' the proper fiery acid o'er its face,And forth the alloy unfastened flies in fume;While, self-sufficient now, the shape remains,The rondure brave, the lilied loveliness,Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore:Prime nature with an added artistry—No carat lost, and you have gained a ring.What of it? 'T is a figure, a symbol, say;A thing's sign: now for the thing signified.

Do you see this square old yellow Book, I tossI' the air, and catch again, and twirl aboutBy the crumpled vellum covers,—pure crude factSecreted from man's life when hearts beat hard,And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since?Examine it yourselves! I found this book,Gave a lira for it, eightpence English just,(Mark the predestination!) when a Hand,Always above my shoulder, pushed me once,One day still fierce 'mid many a day struck calm,Across a Square in Florence, crammed with booths,Buzzing and blaze, noontide and market-time,Toward Baccio's marble,—ay, the basement-ledgeO' the pedestal where sits and menacesJohn of the Black Bands with the upright spear,'Twixt palace and church,—Riccardi where they lived,His race, and San Lorenzo where they lie.This book,—precisely on that palace-stepWhich, meant for lounging knaves o' the Medici,Now serves re-venders to display their ware,—Mongst odds and ends of ravage, picture-framesWhite through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped,Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests,(Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade)Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude,Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyryPolished and rough, sundry amazing bustsIn baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!)A wreck of tapestry, proudly-purposed webWhen reds and blues were indeed red and blue,Now offered as a mat to save bare feet(Since carpets constitute a cruel cost)Treading the chill scagliola bedward: thenA pile of brown-etched prints, two crazie each,Stopped by a conch a-top from fluttering forth—Sowing the Square with works of one and the sameMaster, the imaginative SieneseGreat in the scenic backgrounds—(name and fameNone of you know, nor does he fare the worse:)From these … Oh, with a Lionard going cheapIf it should prove, as promised, that JocondeWhereof a copy contents the Louvre!—theseI picked this book from. Five compeers in flankStood left and right of it as tempting more—A dogseared Spicilegium, the fond taleO' the Frail One of the Flower, by young Dumas,Vulgarized Horace for the use of schools,The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody,Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death and Life,—With this, one glance at the lettered back of which,And "Stall!" cried I: a lira made it mine.

Here it is, this I toss and take again;Small-quarto size, part print part manuscript:A book in shape but, really, pure crude factSecreted from man's life when hearts beat hard,And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since.Give it me back! The thing's restorativeI'the touch and sight.

That memorable day,(June was the month, Lorenzo named the Square)I leaned a little and overlooked my prizeBy the low railing round the fountain-sourceClose to the statue, where a step descends:While clinked the cans of copper, as stooped and roseThick-ankled girls who brimmed them, and made placeFor marketmen glad to pitch basket down,Dip a broad melon-leaf that holds the wet,And whisk their faded fresh. And on I readPresently, though my path grew perilousBetween the outspread straw-work, piles of plaitSoon to be flapping, each o'er two black eyesAnd swathe of Tuscan hair, on festas fine:Through fire-irons, tribes of tongs, shovels in sheaves,Skeleton bedsteads, wardrobe-drawers agape,Rows of tall slim brass lamps with dangling gear,—And worse, cast clothes a-sweetening in the sun:None of them took my eye from off my prize.Still read I on, from written title-pageTo written index, on, through street and street,At the Strozzi, at the Pillar, at the Bridge;Till, by the time I stood at home againIn Casa Guidi by Felice Church,Under the doorway where the black beginsWith the first stone-slab of the staircase cold,I had mastered the contents, knew the whole truthGathered together, bound up in this book,Print three-fifths, written supplement the rest."Romana Homicidiorum"—nay,Better translate—"A Roman murder-case:"Position of the entire criminal cause"Of Guido Franceschini, nobleman,"With certain Four the cutthroats in his pay,"Tried, all five, and found guilty and put to death"By heading or hanging as befitted ranks,"At Rome on February Twenty Two,"Since our salvation Sixteen Ninety Eight:"Wherein it is disputed if, and when,"Husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet 'scape"The customary forfeit."

Word for word,So ran the title-page: murder, or elseLegitimate punishment of the other crime,Accounted murder by mistake,—just thatAnd no more, in a Latin cramp enoughWhen the law had her eloquence to launch,But interfilleted with Italian streaksWhen testimony stooped to mother-tongue,—That, was this old square yellow book about.

Now, as the ingot, ere the ring was forged,Lay gold, (beseech you, hold that figure fast!)So, in this book lay absolutely truth,Fanciless fact, the documents indeed,Primary lawyer-pleadings for, against,The aforesaid Five; real summed-up circumstanceAdduced in proof of these on either side,Put forth and printed, as the practice was,At Rome, in the Apostolic Chamber's type,And so submitted to the eye o' the CourtPresided over by His ReverenceRome's Governor and Criminal Judge,—the trialItself, to all intents, being then as nowHere in the book and nowise out of it;Seeing, there properly was no judgment-bar,No bringing of accuser and accused,And whoso judged both parties, face to faceBefore some court, as we conceive of courts.There was a Hall of Justice; that came last:For Justice had a chamber by the hallWhere she took evidence first, summed up the same,Then sent accuser and accused alike,In person of the advocate of each,To weigh its worth, thereby arrange, arrayThe battle. 'T was the so-styled Fisc began,Pleaded (and since he only spoke in printThe printed voice of him lives now as then)The public Prosecutor—"Murder's proved;"With five … what we call qualities of bad,"Worse, worst, and yet worse still, and still worse yet;"Crest over crest crowning the cockatrice,"That beggar hell's regalia to enrich"Count Guido Franceschini: punish him!"Thus was the paper put before the courtIn the next stage, (no noisy work at all,)To study at ease. In due time like replyCame from the so-styled Patron of the Poor,Official mouthpiece of the five accusedToo poor to fee a better,—Guido's luckOr else his fellows',—which, I hardly know,—An outbreak as of wonder at the world,A fury-fit of outraged innocence,A passion of betrayed simplicity:"Punish Count Guido? For what crime, what hint"O' the colour of a crime, inform us first!"Reward him rather! Recognize, we say,"In the deed done, a righteous judgment dealt!"All conscience and all courage,—there's our Count"Charactered in a word; and, what's more strange,"He had companionship in privilege,"Found four courageous conscientious friends:"Absolve, applaud all five, as props of law,"Sustainers of society!—perchance"A trifle over-hasty with the hand"To hold her tottering ark, had tumbled else;"But that's a splendid fault whereat we wink,"Wishing your cold correctness sparkled so!"Thus paper second followed paper first,Thus did the two join issue—nay, the four,Each pleader having an adjunct. "True, he killed"—So to speak—in a certain sort—his wife,"But laudably, since thus it happed!" quoth one:Whereat, more witness and the case postponed."Thus it happed not, since thus he did the deed,"And proved himself thereby portentousest"Of cutthroats and a prodigy of crime,"As the woman that he slaughtered was a saint,"Martyr and miracle!" quoth the other to match:Again, more witness, and the case postponed."A miracle, ay—of lust and impudence;"Hear my new reasons!" interposed the first:"—Coupled with more of mine!" pursued his peer."Beside, the precedents, the authorities!"From both at once a cry with an echo, that!That was a firebrand at each fox's tailUnleashed in a cornfield: soon spread flare enough,As hurtled thither and there heaped themselvesFrom earth's four corners, all authorityAnd precedent for putting wives to death,Or letting wives live, sinful as they seem.How legislated, now, in this respect,Solon and his Athenians? Quote the codeOf Romulus and Rome! Justinian speak!Nor modern Baldo, Bartolo be dumb!The Roman voice was potent, plentiful;Cornelia de Sicariis hurried to helpPompeia de Parricidiis; Julia deSomething-or-other jostled Lex this-and-that;King Solomon confirmed Apostle Paul:That nice decision of Dolabella, eh?That pregnant instance of Theodoric, oh!Down to that choice example Ælian gives(An instance I find much insisted on)Of the elephant who, brute-beast though he were,Yet understood and punished on the spotHis master's naughty spouse and faithless friend;A true tale which has edified each child,Much more shall flourish favoured by our court!Pages of proof this way, and that way proof,And always—once again the case postponed.Thus wrangled, brangled, jangled they a month,—Only on paper, pleadings all in print,Nor ever was, except i' the brains of men,More noise by word of mouth than you hear now—Till the court cut all short with "Judged, your cause."Receive our sentence! Praise God! We pronounce"Count Guido devilish and damnable:"His wife Pompilia in thought, word and deed,"Was perfect pure, he murdered her for that:"As for the Four who helped the One, all Five—"Why, let employer and hirelings share alike"In guilt and guilt's reward, the death their due!"

So was the trial at end, do you suppose?"Guilty you find him, death you doom him to?"Ay, were not Guido, more than needs, a priest,"Priest and to spare!"—this was a shot reserved;I learn this from epistles which beginHere where the print ends,—see the pen and inkOf the advocate, the ready at a pinch!—"My client boasts the clerkly privilege,"Has taken minor orders many enough,"Shows still sufficient chrism upon his pate"To neutralize a blood-stain: presbyter,"Primæ tonsuræ, subdiaconus,"Sacerdos, so he slips from underneath"Your power, the temporal, slides inside the robe"Of mother Church: to her we make appeal"By the Pope, the Church's head!"

A parlous plea,Put in with noticeable effect, it seems;"Since straight,"—resumes the zealous orator,Making a friend acquainted with the facts,—"Once the word 'clericality' let fall,"Procedure stopped and freer breath was drawn"By all considerate and responsible Rome."Quality took the decent part, of course;Held by the husband, who was noble too:Or, for the matter of that, a churl would sideWith too-refined susceptibility,And honour which, tender in the extreme,Stung to the quick, must roughly right itselfAt all risks, not sit still and whine for lawAs a Jew would, if you squeezed him to the wall,Brisk-trotting through the Ghetto. Nay, it seems,Even the Emperor's Envoy had his sayTo say on the subject; might not see, unmoved,Civility menaced throughout ChristendomBy too harsh measure dealt her champion here.Lastly, what made all safe, the Pope was kind,From his youth up, reluctant to take life,If mercy might be just and yet show grace;Much more unlikely then, in extreme age,To take a life the general sense bade spare.'T was plain that Guido would go scatheless yet.

But human promise, oh, how short of shine!How topple down the piles of hope we rear!How history proves … nay, read Herodotus!Suddenly starting from a nap, as it were,A dog-sleep with one shut, one open orb,Cried the Pope's great self,—Innocent by nameAnd nature too, and eighty-six years old,Antonio Pignatelli of Naples, PopeWho had trod many lands, known many deeds,Probed many hearts, beginning with his own,And now was far in readiness for God,—'T was he who first bade leave those souls in peace,Those Jansenists, re-nicknamed Molinists,('Gainst whom the cry went, like a frowsy tune,Tickling men's ears—the sect for a quarter of an hourI' the teeth of the world which, clown-like, loves to chewBe it but a straw 'twixt work and whistling-while,Taste some vituperation, bite away,Whether at marjoram-sprig or garlic-clove,Aught it may sport with, spoil, and then spit forth)"Leave them alone," bade he, "those Molinists!"Who may have other light than we perceive,"Or why is it the whole world hates them thus?"Also he peeled off that last scandal-ragOf Nepotism; and so observed the poorThat men would merrily say, "Halt, deaf and blind,"Who feed on fat things, leave the master's self"To gather up the fragments of his feast,'These be the nephews of Pope Innocent!—"His own meal costs but five carlines a day,"Poor-priest's allowance, for he claims no more."—He cried of a sudden, this great good old Pope,When they appealed in last resort to him,"I have mastered the whole matter: I nothing doubt."Though Guido stood forth priest from head to heel,"Instead of, as alleged, a piece of one,—"And further, were he, from the tonsured scalp"To the sandaled sole of him, my son and Christ's,"Instead of touching us by finger-tip"As you assert, and pressing up so close"Only to set a blood-smutch on our robe,—"I and Christ would renounce all right in him."Am I not Pope, and presently to die,"And busied how to render my account,"And shall I wait a day ere I decide"On doing or not doing justice here?"Cut off his head to-morrow by this time,"Hang up his four mates, two on either hand,"And end one business more!"

So said, so done—Rather so writ, for the old Pope bade this,I find, with his particular chirograph,His own no such infirm hand, Friday night;And next day, February Twenty Two,Since our salvation Sixteen Ninety Eight,—Not at the proper head-and-hanging-placeOn bridge-foot close by Castle Angelo,Where custom somewhat staled the spectacle,('T was not so well i' the way of Rome, beside,The noble Rome, the Rome of Guido's rank)But at the city's newer gayer end,—The cavalcading promenading placeBeside the gate and opposite the churchUnder the Pincian gardens green with Spring,'Neath the obelisk 'twixt the fountains in the Square,Did Guido and his fellows find their fate,All Rome for witness, and—my writer adds—Remonstrant in its universal grief,Since Guido had the suffrage of all Rome.

This is the bookful; thus far take the truth,The untempered gold, the fact untampered with,The mere ring-metal ere the ring be made!And what has hitherto come of it? Who preservesThe memory of this Guido, and his wifePompilia, more than Ademollo's name,The etcher of those prints, two crazie each,Saved by a stone from snowing broad the SquareWith scenic backgrounds? Was this truth of force?Able to take its own part as truth should,Sufficient, self-sustaining? Why, if so—Yonder's a fire, into it goes my book,As who shall say me nay, and what the loss?You know the tale already: I may ask,Rather than think to tell you, more thereof,—Ask you not merely who were he and she,Husband and wife, what manner of mankind,But how you hold concerning this and thatOther yet-unnamed actor in the piece.The young frank handsome courtly Canon, now,The priest, declared the lover of the wife,He who, no question, did elope with her,For certain bring the tragedy about,Giuseppe Caponsacchi;—his strange courseI' the matter, was it right or wrong or both?Then the old couple, slaughtered with the wifeBy the husband as accomplices in crime,Those Comparini, Pietro and his spouse,—What say you to the right or wrong of that,When, at a known name whispered through the doorOf a lone villa on a Christmas night,It opened that the joyous hearts insideMight welcome as it were an angel-guestCome in Christ's name to knock and enter, supAnd satisfy the loving ones he saved;And so did welcome devils and their death?I have been silent on that circumstanceAlthough the couple passed for close of kinTo wife and husband, were by some accountsPompilia's very parents: you know best.Also that infant the great joy was for,That Gaetano, the wife's two-weeks' babe,The husband's first-born child, his son and heir,Whose birth and being turned his night to day—Why must the father kill the mother thusBecause she bore his son and saved himself?

Well, British Public, ye who like me not,(God love you!) and will have your proper laughAt the dark question, laugh it! I laugh first.Truth must prevail, the proverb vows; and truth—Here is it all i' the book at last, as firstThere it was all i' the heads and hearts of RomeGentle and simple, never to fall nor fadeNor be forgotten. Yet, a little while,The passage of a century or so,Decads thrice five, and here's time paid his tax,Oblivion gone home with her harvesting,And all left smooth again as scythe could shave.Far from beginning with you London folk,I took my book to Rome first, tried truth's powerOn likely people. "Have you met such names?"Is a tradition extant of such facts?"Your law-courts stand, your records frown a-row:"What if I rove and rummage?" "—Why, you'll waste"Your pains and end as wise as you began!"Everyone snickered: "names and facts thus old"Are newer much than Europe news we find"Down in to-day's Diario. Records, quotha?"Why, the French burned them, what else do the French?"The rap-and-rending nation! And it tells"Against the Church, no doubt,—another gird"At the Temporality, your Trial, of course?""—Quite otherwise this time," submitted I;"Clean for the Church and dead against the world,"The flesh and the devil, does it tell for once.""—The rarer and the happier! All the same,"Content you with your treasure of a book,"And waive what's wanting! Take a friend's advice!"It's not the custom of the country. Mend"Your ways indeed and we may stretch a point:"Go get you manned by Manning and new-manned"By Newman and, mayhap, wise-manned to boot"By Wiseman, and we'll see or else we won't!"Thanks meantime for the story, long and strong,"A pretty piece of narrative enough,"Which scarce ought so to drop out, one would think,"From the more curious annals of our kind."Do you tell the story, now, in off-hand style,"Straight from the book? Or simply here and there,"(The while you vault it through the loose and large)"Hang to a hint? Or is there book at all,"And don't you deal in poetry, make-believe,"And the white lies it sounds like?"

Yes and no!From the book, yes; thence bit by bit I dugThe lingot truth, that memorable day,Assayed and knew my piecemeal gain was gold,—Yes; but from something else surpassing that,Something of mine which, mixed up with the mass,Made it bear hammer and be firm to file.Fancy with fact is just one fact the more;To-wit, that fancy has informed, transpierced,Thridded and so thrown fast the facts else free,As right through ring and ring runs the djereedAnd binds the loose, one bar without a break.I fused my live soul and that inert stuff,Before attempting smithcraft, on the nightAfter the day when,—truth thus grasped and gained,—The book was shut and done with and laid byOn the cream-coloured massive agate, broad'Neath the twin cherubs in the tarnished frameO' the mirror, tall thence to the ceiling-top.And from the reading, and that slab I leantMy elbow on, the while I read and read,I turned, to free myself and find the world,And stepped out on the narrow terrace, builtOver the street and opposite the church,And paced its lozenge-brickwork sprinkled cool;Because Felice-church-side stretched, a-glowThrough each square window fringed for festival,Whence came the clear voice of the cloistered onesChanting a chant made for midsummer nights—I know not what particular praise of God,It always came and went with June. BeneathI' the street, quick shown by openings of the skyWhen flame fell silently from cloud to cloud,Richer than that gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes,The townsmen walked by twos and threes, and talked,Drinking the blackness in default of air—A busy human sense beneath my feet:While in and out the terrace-plants, and roundOne branch of tall datura, waxed and wanedThe lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower.Over the roof o' the lighted church I lookedA bowshot to the street's end, north awayOut of the Roman gate to the Roman roadBy the river, till I felt the Apennine.And there would lie Arezzo, the man's town,The woman's trap and cage and torture-place,Also the stage where the priest played his part,A spectacle for angels,—ay, indeed,There lay Arezzo! Farther then I fared,Feeling my way on through the hot and dense,Romeward, until I found the wayside innBy Castelnuovo's few mean hut-like homesHuddled together on the hill-foot bleak,Bare, broken only by that tree or twoAgainst the sudden bloody splendour pouredCursewise in day's departure by the sunO'er the low house-roof of that squalid innWhere they three, for the first time and the last,Husband and wife and priest, met face to face.Whence I went on again, the end was near,Step by step, missing none and marking all,Till Rome itself, the ghastly goal, I reached.Why, all the while,—how could it otherwise?—The life in me abolished the death of things,Deep calling unto deep: as then and thereActed itself over again once moreThe tragic piece. I saw with my own eyesIn Florence as I trod the terrace, breathedThe beauty and the fearfulness of night,How it had run, this round from Rome to Rome—Because, you are to know, they lived at Rome,Pompilia's parents, as they thought themselves,Two poor ignoble hearts who did their bestPart God's way, part the other way than God's,To somehow make a shift and scramble throughThe world's mud, careless if it splashed and spoiled,Provided they might so hold high, keep cleanTheir child's soul, one soul white enough for three,And lift it to whatever star should stoop,What possible sphere of purer life than theirsShould come in aid of whiteness hard to save.I saw the star stoop, that they strained to touch,And did touch and depose their treasure on,As Guido Franceschini took awayPompilia to be his for evermore,While they sang "Now let us depart in peace,"Having beheld thy glory, Guido's wife!"I saw the star supposed, but fog o' the fen,Gilded star-fashion by a glint from hell;Having been heaved up, haled on its gross way,By hands unguessed before, invisible helpFrom a dark brotherhood, and speciallyTwo obscure goblin creatures, fox-faced this,Cat-clawed the other, called his next of kinBy Guido the main monster,—cloaked and caped,Making as they were priests, to mock God more,—Abate Paul, Canon Girolamo.These who had rolled the starlike pest to RomeAnd stationed it to suck up and absorbThe sweetness of Pompilia, rolled againThat bloated bubble, with her soul inside,Back to Arezzo and a palace there—Or say, a fissure in the honest earthWhence long ago had curled the vapour first,Blown big by nether firs to appal day:It touched home, broke, and blasted far and wide.I saw the cheated couple find the cheatAnd guess what foul rite they were captured for,—Too fain to follow over hill and daleThat child of theirs caught up thus in the cloudAnd carried by the Prince o' the Power of the AirWhither he would, to wilderness or sea.I saw them, in the potency of fear,Break somehow through the satyr-family(For a grey mother with a monkey-mien,Mopping and mowing, was apparent too,As, confident of capture, all took handsAnd danced about the captives in a ring)—Saw them break through, breathe safe, at Rome again,Saved by the selfish instinct, losing soTheir loved one left with haters. These I saw,In recrudescency of baffled hate,Prepare to wring the uttermost revengeFrom body and soul thus left them: all was sure,Fire laid and cauldron set, the obscene ring traced,The victim stripped and prostrate: what of God?The cleaving of a cloud, a cry, a crash,Quenched lay their cauldron, cowered i' the dust the crew,As, in a glory of armour like Saint George,Out again sprang the young good beauteous priestBearing away the lady in his arms,Saved for a splendid minute and no more.For, whom i' the path did that priest come upon,He and the poor lost lady borne so brave,—Checking the song of praise in me, had elseSwelled to the full for God's will done on earth—Whom but a dusk misfeatured messenger,No other than the angel of this life,Whose care is lest men see too much at once.He made the sign, such God-glimpse must suffice,Nor prejudice the Prince o' the Power of the Air,Whose ministration piles us overheadWhat we call, first, earth's roof and, last, heaven's floor,Now grate o' the trap, then outlet of the cage:So took the lady, left the priest alone,And once more canopied the world with black.But through the blackness I saw Rome again,And where a solitary villa stoodIn a lone garden-quarter: it was eve,The second of the year, and oh so cold!Ever and anon there flittered through the airA snow-flake, and a scanty couch of snowCrusted the grass-walk and the garden-mould.All was grave, silent, sinister,—when, ha?Glimmeringly did a pack of were-wolves padThe snow, those flames were Guido's eyes in front,And all five found and footed it, the track,To where a threshold-streak of warmth and lightBetrayed the villa-door with life inside,While an inch outside were those blood-bright eyes,And black lips wrinkling o'er the flash of teeth,And tongues that lolled—Oh God that madest man!They parleyed in their language. Then one whined—That was the policy and master-stroke—Deep in his throat whispered what seemed a name—"Open to Caponsacchi!" Guido cried:"Gabriel!" cried Lucifer at Eden-gate.Wide as a heart, opened the door at once,Showing the joyous couple, and their childThe two-weeks' mother, to the wolves, the wolvesTo them. Close eyes! And when the corpses layStark-stretched, and those the wolves, their wolf-work done,Were safe-embosomed by the night again,I knew a necessary change in things;As when the worst watch of the night gives way,And there comes duly, to take cognizance,The scrutinizing eye-point of some star—And who despairs of a new daybreak now?Lo, the first ray protruded on those five!It reached them, and each felon writhed transfixed.Awhile they palpitated on the spearMotionless over Tophet: stand or fall?"I say, the spear should fall—should stand, I say!"Cried the world come to judgment, granting graceOr dealing doom according to world's wont,Those world's-bystanders grouped on Rome's crossroadAt prick and summons of the primal curseWhich bids man love as well as make a lie.There prattled they, discoursed the right and wrong,Turned wrong to right, proved wolves sheep and sheep wolves,So that you scarce distinguished fell from fleece;Till out spoke a great guardian of the fold,Stood up, put forth his hand that held the crook,And motioned that the arrested point decline:Horribly off, the wriggling dead-weight reeled,Rushed to the bottom and lay ruined there.Though still at the pit's mouth, despite the smokeO' the burning, tarriers turned again to talkAnd trim the balance, and detect at leastA touch of wolf in what showed whitest sheep,A cross of sheep redeeming the whole wolf,—Vex truth a little longer:—less and less,Because years came and went, and more and moreBrought new lies with them to be loved in turn.Till all at once the memory of the thing,—The fact that, wolves or sheep, such creatures were,—Which hitherto, however men supposed,Had somehow plain and pillar-like prevailedI' the midst of them, indisputably fact,Granite, time's tooth should grate against, not graze,—Why, this proved sandstone, friable, fast to flyAnd give its grain away at wish o' the wind.Ever and ever more diminutive,Base gone, shaft lost, only entablature,Dwindled into no bigger than a book,Lay of the column; and that little, leftBy the roadside 'mid the ordure, shards and weeds.Until I haply, wandering that lone way,Kicked it up, turned it over, and recognized,For all the crumblement, this abacus,This square old yellow book,—could calculateBy this the lost proportions of the style.

This was it from, my fancy with those facts,I used to tell the tale, turned gay to grave,But lacked a listener seldom; such alloy,Such substance of me interfused the goldWhich, wrought into a shapely ring therewith,Hammered and filed, fingered and favoured, lastLay ready for the renovating washO' the water. "How much of the tale was true?"I disappeared; the book grew all in all;The lawyers' pleadings swelled back to their size,—Doubled in two, the crease upon them yet,For more commodity of carriage, see!—And these are letters, veritable sheetsThat brought posthaste the news to Florence, writAt Rome the day Count Guido died, we find,To stay the craving of a client there,Who bound the same and so produced my book.Lovers of dead truth, did ye fare the worse?Lovers of live truth, found ye false my tale?

Well, now; there's nothing in nor out o' the worldGood except truth: yet this, the something else,What's this then, which proves good yet seems untrue?This that I mixed with truth, motions of mineThat quickened, made the inertness malleolableO'the gold was not mine,—what's your name for this?Are means to the end, themselves in part the end?Is fiction which makes fact alive, fact too?The somehow may be thishow.

I find firstWrit down for very A B C of fact,"In the beginning God made heaven and earth;"From which, no matter with what lisp, I spellAnd speak you out a consequence—that man,Man,—as befits the made, the inferior thing,—Purposed, since made, to grow, not make in turn,Yet forced to try and make, else fail to grow,—Formed to rise, reach at, if not grasp and gainThe good beyond him,—which attempt is growth,—Repeats God's process in man's due degree,Attaining man's proportionate result,—Creates, no, but resuscitates, perhaps.Inalienable, the arch-prerogativeWhich turns thought, act—conceives, expresses too!No less, man, bounded, yearning to be free,May so proiect his surplusage of soulIn search of body, so add self to selfBy owning what lay ownerless before,—So find, so fill full, so appropriate forms—That, although nothing which had never lifeShall get life from him, be, not having been,Yet, something dead may get to live again,Something with too much life or not enough,Which, either way imperfect, ended once:An end whereat man's impulse intervenes,Makes new beginning, starts the dead alive,Completes the incomplete and saves the thing.Man's breath were vain to light a virgin wick,—Half-burned-out, all but quite-quenched wicks o' the lampStationed for temple-service on this earth,These indeed let him breathe on and relume!For such man's feat is, in the due degree,—Mimic creation, galvanism for life,But still a glory portioned in the scale.Why did the mage say,—feeling as we are wontFor truth, and stopping midway short of truth,And resting on a lie,—"I raise a ghost"?"Because," he taught adepts, "man makes not man."Yet by a special gift, an art of arts,"More insight and more outsight and much more"Will to use both of these than boast my mates,"I can detach from me, commission forth"Half of my soul; which in its pilgrimage"O'er old unwandered waste ways of the world,"May chance upon some fragment of a whole,"Rag of flesh, scrap of bone in dim disuse,"Smoking flax that fed fire once: prompt therein"I enter, spark-like, put old powers to play,"Push lines out to the limit, lead forth last"(By a moonrise through a ruin of a crypt)"What shall be mistily seen, murmuringly heard,"Mistakenly felt: then write my name with Faust's!"Oh, Faust, why Faust? Was not Elisha once?—Who bade them lay his staff on a corpse-face.There was no voice, no hearing: he went inTherefore, and shut the door upon them twain,And prayed unto the Lord: and he went upAnd lay upon the corpse, dead on the couch,And put his mouth upon its mouth, his eyesUpon its eyes, his hands upon its hands,And stretched him on the flesh; the flesh waxed warm:And he returned, walked to and fro the house,And went up, stretched him on the flesh again,And the eyes opened. 'T is a credible featWith the right man and way.

Enough of me!The Book! I turn its medicinable leavesIn London now till, as in Florence erst,A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb,And lights my eye, and lifts me by the hair,Letting me have my will again with these—How title I the dead alive once more?

Count Guido Franceschini the Aretine,Descended of an ancient house, though poor,A beak-nosed bushy-bearded black-haired lord,Lean, pallid, low of stature yet robust,Fifty years old,—having four years agoMarried Pompilia Comparini, young,Good, beautiful, at Rome, where she was born,And brought her to Arezzo, where they livedUnhappy lives, whatever curse the cause,—This husband, taking four accomplices,Followed this wife to Rome, where she was fledFrom their Arezzo to find peace again,In convoy, eight months earlier, of a priest,Aretine also, of still nobler birth,Giuseppe Caponsacchi,—caught her thereQuiet in a villa on a Christmas night,With only Pietro and Violante by,Both her putative parents; killed the three,Aged, they, seventy each, and she, seventeen,And, two weeks since, the mother of his babeFirst-born and heir to what the style was worthO' the Guido who determined, dared and didThis deed just as he purposed point by point.Then, bent upon escape, but hotly pressed,And captured with his co-mates that same night,He, brought to trial, stood on this defence—Injury to his honour caused the act;And since his wife was false, (as manifestBy flight from home in such companionship,)Death, punishment deserved of the false wifeAnd faithless parents who abetted herI' the flight aforesaid, wronged nor God nor man."Nor false she, nor yet faithless they," repliedThe accuser; "cloaked and masked this murder glooms;"True was Pompilia, loyal too the pair;"Out of the man's own heart a monster curled"Which crime coiled with connivancy at crime—"His victim's breast, he tells you, hatched and reared;"Uncoil we and stretch stark the worm of hell!"A month the trial swayed this way and thatEre judgment settled down on Guido's guilt;Then was the Pope, that good Twelfth Innocent,Appealed to: who well weighed what went before,Affirmed the guilt and gave the guilty doom.

Let this old woe step on the stage again!Act itself o'er anew for men to judge,Not by the very sense and sight indeed—(Which take at best imperfect cognizance,Since, how heart moves brain, and how both move hand,What mortal ever in entirety saw?)—No dose of purer truth than man digests,But truth with falsehood, milk that feeds him now,Not strong meat he may get to bear some day—To-wit, by voices we call evidence,Uproar in the echo, live fact deadened down,Talked over, bruited abroad, whispered away,Yet helping us to all we seem to hear:For how else know we save by worth of word?

Here are the voices presently shall soundIn due succession. First, the world's outcryAround the rush and ripple of any factFallen stonewise, plumb on the smooth face of things;The world's guess, as it crowds the bank o' the pool,At what were figure and substance, by their splash:Then, by vibrations in the general mind,At depth of deed already out of reach.This threefold murder of the day before,—Say, Half-Rome's feel after the vanished truth;Honest enough, as the way is: all the same,Harbouring in the centre of its senseA hidden germ of failure, shy but sure,To neutralize that honesty and leaveThat feel for truth at fault, as the way is too.Some prepossession such as starts amiss,By but a hair's breadth at the shoulder-blade,The arm o' the feeler, dip he ne'er so bold;So leads arm waveringly, lets fall wideO' the mark its finger, sent to find and fixTruth at the bottom, that deceptive speck.With this Half-Rome,—the source of swerving, callOver-belief in Guido's right and wrongRather than in Pompilia's wrong and right:Who shall say how, who shall say why? 'T is there—The instinctive theorizing whence a factLooks to the eye as the eye likes the look.Gossip in a public place, a sample-speech.Some worthy, with his previous hint to findA husband's side the safer, and no whitAware he is not Æacus the while,—How such an one supposes and states factTo whosoever of a multitudeWill listen, and perhaps prolong therebyThe not-unpleasant flutter at the breast,Born of a certain spectacle shut inBy the church Lorenzo opposite. So, they loungeMidway the mouth o'the street, on Corso side,'Twixt palace Fiano and palace Ruspoli,Linger and listen; keeping clear o' the crowd,Yet wishful one could lend that crowd one's eyes,(So universal is its plague of squint)And make hearts beat our time that flutter false:—All for the truth's sake, mere truth, nothing else!How Half-Rome found for Guido much excuse.

Next, from Rome's other half, the opposite feelFor truth with a like swerve, like unsuccess,—Or if success, by no skill but more luckThis time, through siding rather with the wife,Because a fancy-fit inclined that way,Than with the husband. One wears drab, one pink;Who wears pink, ask him "Which shall win the race,"Of coupled runners like as egg and egg?""—Why, if I must choose, he with the pink scarf."Doubtless for some such reason choice fell here.A piece of public talk to correspondAt the next stage of the story; just a dayLet pass and new day brings the proper change.Another sample-speech i' the market-placeO' the Barberini by the Capucins;Where the old Triton, at his fountain-sport,Bernini's creature plated to the paps,Puffs up steel sleet which breaks to diamond dust,A spray of sparkles snorted from his conch,High over the caritellas, out o' the wayO' the motley merchandizing multitude.Our murder has been done three days ago,The frost is over and gone, the south wind laughs,And, to the very tiles of each red roofA-smoke i' the sunshine, Rome lies gold and glad:So, listen how, to the other half of Rome,Pompilia seemed a saint and martyr both!

Then, yet another day let come and go,With pause prelusive still of novelty,Hear a fresh speaker!—neither this nor thatHalf-Rome aforesaid; something bred of both:One and one breed the inevitable three.Such is the personage harangues you next;The elaborated product, tertium quid:Rome's first commotion in subsidence givesThe curd o'the cream, flower o' the wheat, as it were,And finer sense o' the city. Is this plain?You get a reasoned statement of the case,Eventual verdict of the curious fewWho care to sift a business to the branNor coarsely bolt it like the simpler sort.Here, after ignorance, instruction speaks;Here, clarity of candour, history's soul,The critical mind, in short: no gossip-guess.What the superior social section thinks,In person of some man of qualityWho,—breathing musk from lace-work and brocade,His solitaire amid the flow of frill,Powdered peruke on nose, and bag at back,And cane dependent from the ruffled wrist,—Harangues in silvery and selectest phrase'Neath waxlight in a glorified saloonWhere mirrors multiply the girandole:Courting the approbation of no mob,But Eminence This and All-Illustrious ThatWho take snuff softly, range in well-bred ring,Card-table-quitters for observance' sake,Around the argument, the rational word—Still, spite its weight and worth, a sample-speech.How Quality dissertated on the case.

So much for Rome and rumour; smoke comes first:Once let smoke rise untroubled, we descryClearlier what tongues of flame may spire and spitTo eye and ear, each with appropriate tingeAccording to its food, or pure or foul.The actors, no mere rumours of the act,Intervene. First you hear Count Guido's voice,In a small chamber that adjoins the court,Where Governor and Judges, summoned thence,Tommati, Venturini and the rest,Find the accused ripe for declaring truth.Soft-cushioned sits he; yet shifts seat, shirks touch,As, with a twitchy brow and wincing lipAnd cheek that changes to all kinds of white,He proffers his defence, in tones subduedNear to mock-mildness now, so mournful seemsThe obtuser sense truth fails to satisfy;Now, moved, from pathos at the wrong endured,To passion; for the natural man is rousedAt fools who first do wrong then pour the blameOf their wrong-doing, Satan-like, on Job.Also his tongue at times is hard to curb;Incisive, nigh satiric bites the phrase,Rough-raw, yet somehow claiming privilege—It is so hard for shrewdness to admitFolly means no harm when she calls black white!—Eruption momentary at the most,Modified forthwith by a fall o' the fire,Sage acquiescence; for the world's the world,And, what it errs in, Judges rectify:He feels he has a fist, then folds his armsCrosswise and makes his mind up to be meek.And never once does he detach his eyeFrom those ranged there to slay him or to save,But does his best man's-service for himself,Despite,—what twitches brow and makes lip wince,—His limbs' late taste of what was called the Cord,Or Vigil-torture more facetiously.Even so; they were wont to tease the truthOut of loth witness (toying, trifling time)By torture: 't was a trick, a vice of the age,Here, there and everywhere, what would you have?Religion used to tell HumanityShe gave him warrant or denied him course.And since the course was much to his own mind,Of pinching flesh and pulling bone from boneTo unhusk truth a-hiding in its hulls,Nor whisper of a warning stopped the way,He, in their joint behalf, the burly slave,Bestirred him, mauled and maimed all recusants,While, prim in place, Religion overlooked;And so had done till doomsday, never a signNor sound of interference from her mouth,But that at last the burly slave wiped brow,Let eye give notice as if soul were there,Muttered "'T is a vile trick, foolish more than vile,"Should have been counted sin; I make it so:"At any rate no more of it for me—"Nay, for I break the torture-engine thus!"Then did Religion start up, stare amain,Look round for help and see none, smile and say"What, broken is the rack? Well done of thee!"Did I forget to abrogate its use?"Be the mistake in common with us both!"—One more fault our blind age shall answer for,"Down in my book denounced though it must be"Somewhere. Henceforth find truth by milder means!"Ah but, Religion, did we wait for theeTo ope the book, that serves to sit upon,And pick such place out, we should wait indeed!That is all history: and what is not now,Was then, defendants found it to their cost.How Guido, after being tortured, spoke.

Also hear Caponsacchi who comes next,Man and priest—could you comprehend the coil!—In days when that was rife which now is rare.How, mingling each its multifarious wires,Now heaven, now earth, now heaven and earth at once,Had plucked at and perplexed their puppet here,Played off the young frank personable priest;Sworn fast and tonsured plain heaven's celibate,And yet earth's clear-accepted servitor,A courtly spiritual Cupid, squire of damesBy law of love and mandate of the mode.The Church's own, or why parade her seal,Wherefore that chrism and consecrative work?Yet verily the world's, or why go badgedA prince of sonneteers and lutanists,Show colour of each vanity in vogueBorne with decorum due on blameless breast?All that is changed now, as he tells the courtHow he had played the part excepted at;Tells it, moreover, now the second time:Since, for his cause of scandal, his own shareI' the flight from home and husband of the wife,He has been censured, punished in a sortBy relegation,—exile, we should say,To a short distance for a little time,—Whence he is summoned on a sudden now,Informed that she, he thought to save, is lost,And, in a breath, bidden re-tell his tale,Since the first telling somehow missed effect,And then advise in the matter. There stands he,While the same grim black-panelled chamber blinksAs though rubbed shiny with the sins of RomeTold the same oak for ages—wave-washed wallAgainst which sets a sea of wickedness.There, where you yesterday heard Guido speak,Speaks Caponsacchi; and there face him tooTommati, Venturini and the restWho, eight months earlier, scarce repressed the smile,Forewent the wink; waived recognition soOf peccadillos incident to youth,Especially youth high-born; for youth means love,Vows can't change nature, priests are only men,And love likes stratagem and subterfugeWhich age, that once was youth, should recognize,May blame, but needs not press too hard upon.Here sit the old Judges then, but with no graceOf reverend carriage, magisterial port:For why? The accused of eight months since,—the sameWho cut the conscious figure of a fool,Changed countenance, dropped bashful gaze to ground,While hesitating for an answer then,—Now is grown judge himself, terrifies nowThis, now the other culprit called a judge,Whose turn it is to stammer and look strange,As he speaks rapidly, angrily, speech that smites:And they keep silence, bear blow after blow,Because the seeming-solitary man,Speaking for God, may have an audience too,Invisible, no discreet judge provokes.How the priest Caponsacchi said his say.

Then a soul sighs its lowest and its lastAfter the loud ones,—so much breath remainsUnused by the four-days'-dying; for she livedThus long, miraculously long, 't was thought,Just that Pompilia might defend herself.How, while the hireling and the alien stoop,Comfort, yet question,—since the time is brief,And folk, allowably inquisitive,Encircle the low pallet where she liesIn the good house that helps the poor to die,—Pompilia tells the story of her life.For friend and lover,—leech and man of lawDo service; busy helpful ministrantsAs varied in their calling as their mind,Temper and age: and yet from all of these,About the white bed under the arched roof,Is somehow, as it were, evolved a one,—Small separate sympathies combined and large,Nothings that were, grown something very much:As if the bystanders gave each his straw,All he had, though a trifle in itself,Which, plaited all together, made a CrossFit to die looking on and praying with,Just as well as if ivory or gold.So, to the common kindliness she speaks,There being scarce more privacy at the lastFor mind than body: but she is used to bear,And only unused to the brotherly look.How she endeavoured to explain her life.

Then, since a Trial ensued, a touch o' the sameTo sober us, flustered with frothy talk,And teach our common sense its helplessness.For why deal simply with divining-rod,Scrape where we fancy secret sources flow,And ignore law, the recognized machine,Elaborate display of pipe and wheelFramed to unchoke, pump up and pour apaceTruth till a flowery foam shall wash the world?The patent truth-extracting process,—ha?Let us make that grave mystery turn one wheel,Give you a single grind of law at least!One orator, of two on either side,Shall teach us the puissance of the tongue—That is, o' the pen which simulated tongueOn paper and saved all except the soundWhich never was. Law's speech beside law's thought?That were too stunning, too immense an odds:That point of vantage law lets nobly pass.One lawyer shall admit us to beholdThe manner of the making out a case,First fashion of a speech; the chick in egg,The masterpiece law's bosom incubates.How Don Giacinto of the Arcangeli,Called Procurator of the Poor at Rome,Now advocate for Guido and his mates,—The jolly learned man of middle age,Cheek and jowl all in laps with fat and law,Mirthful as mighty, yet, as great hearts use,Despite the name and fame that tempt our flesh,Constant to that devotion of the hearth,Still captive in those dear domestic ties!—How he,—having a cause to triumph with,All kind of interests to keep intact,More than one efficacious personageTo tranquillize, conciliate and secure,And above all, public anxietyTo quiet, show its Guido in good hands,—Also, as if such burdens were too light,A certain family-feast to claim his care,The birthday-banquet for the only son—Paternity at smiling strife with law—How he brings both to buckle in one bond;And, thick at throat, with waterish under-eye,Turns to his task and settles in his seatAnd puts his utmost means in practice now:Wheezes out law-phrase, whiffles Latin forth,And, just as though roast lamb would never be,Makes logic levigate the big crime small:Rubs palm on palm, rakes foot with itchy foot,Conceives and inchoates the argument,Sprinkling each flower appropriate to the time,—Ovidian quip or Ciceronian crank,A-bubble in the larynx while he laughs,As he had fritters deep down frying there.How he turns, twists, and tries the oily thingShall be—first speech for Guido 'gainst the Fisc.Then with a skip as it were from heel to head,Leaving yourselves fill up the middle bulkO' the Trial, reconstruct its shape august,From such exordium clap we to the close;Give you, if we dare wing to such a height,The absolute glory in some full-grown speechOn the other side, some finished butterfly,Some breathing diamond-flake with leaf-gold fans,That takes the air, no trace of worm it was,Or cabbage-bed it had production from.Giovambattista o' the Bottini, Fisc,Pompilia's patron by the chance of the hour,To-morrow her persecutor,—composite, he,As becomes who must meet such various calls—Odds of age joined in him with ends of youth.A man of ready smile and facile tear,Improvised hopes, despairs at nod and beck,And language—ah, the gift of eloquence!Language that goes, goes, easy as a glove,O'er good and evil, smoothens both to one.Rashness helps caution with him, fires the straw,In free enthusiastic careless fit,On the first proper pinnacle of rockWhich offers, as reward for all that zeal,To lure some bark to founder and bring gain:While calm sits Caution, rapt with heavenward eye,A true confessor's gaze, amid the glareBeaconing to the breaker, death and hell."Well done, thou good and faithful" she approves:"Hadst thou let slip a faggot to the beach,"The crew might surely spy thy precipice"And save their boat; the simple and the slow"Might so, forsooth, forestall the wrecker's fee!"Let the next crew be wise and hail in time!"Just so compounded is the outside man,Blue juvenile pure eye and pippin cheek,And brow all prematurely soiled and seamedWith sudden age, bright devastated hair.Ah, but you miss the very tones o' the voice,The scrannel pipe that screams in heights of head,As, in his modest studio, all alone,The tall wight stands a-tiptoe, strives and strains,Both eyes shut, like the cockerel that would crow,Tries to his own self amorously o'erWhat never will be uttered else than so—Since to the four walls, Forum and Mars' Hill,Speaks out the poesy which, penned, turns prose.Clavecinist debarred his instrument,He yet thrums—shirking neither turn nor trill,With desperate finger on dumb table-edge—The sovereign rondo, shall conclude his Suite,Charm an imaginary audience there,From old Corelli to young Haendel, bothI' the flesh at Rome, ere he perforce go printThe cold black score, mere music for the mind—The last speech against Guido and his gang,With special end to prove Pompilia pure.How the Fisc vindicates Pompilia's fame.

Then comes the all but end, the ultimateJudgment save yours. Pope Innocent the Twelfth,Simple, sagacious, mild yet resolute,With prudence, probity and—what besideFrom the other world he feels impress at times,Having attained to fourscore years and six,—How, when the court found Guido and the restGuilty, but law supplied a subterfugeAnd passed the final sentence to the Pope,He, bringing his intelligence to bearThis last time on what ball behoves him dropIn the urn, or white or black, does drop a black,Send five souls more to just precede his own,Stand him in stead and witness, if need were,How he is wont to do God's work on earth.The manner of his sitting out the dimDroop of a sombre February dayIn the plain closet where he does such work,With, from all Peter's treasury, one stool,One table and one lathen crucifix.There sits the Pope, his thoughts for company;Grave but not sad,—nay, something like a cheerLeaves the lips free to be benevolent,Which, all day long, did duty firm and fast.A cherishing there is of foot and knee,A chafing loose-skinned large-veined hand with hand,—What steward but knows when stewardship earns its wage,May levy praise, anticipate the lord?He reads, notes, lays the papers down at last,Muses, then takes a turn about the room;Unclasps a huge tome in an antique guise,Primitive print and tongue half obsolete,That stands him in diurnal stead; opes page,Finds place where falls the passage to be connedAccording to an order long in use:And, as he comes upon the evening's chance,Starts somewhat, solemnizes straight his smile,Then reads aloud that portion first to last,And at the end lets flow his own thoughts forthLikewise aloud, for respite and relief,Till by the dreary relics of the westWan through the half-moon window, all his light,He bows the head while the lips move in prayer,Writes some three brief lines, signs and seals the same,Tinkles a hand-bell, bids the obsequious SirWho puts foot presently o' the closet-sillHe watched outside of, bear as superscribedThat mandate to the Governor forthwith:Then heaves abroad his cares in one good sigh,Traverses corridor with no arm's help,And so to sup as a clear conscience should.The manner of the judgment of the Pope.

Then must speak Guido yet a second time,Satan's old saw being apt here—skin for skin,All a man hath that will he give for life.While life was graspable and gainable,And bird-like buzzed her wings round Guido's brow,Not much truth stiffened out the web of wordsHe wove to catch her: when away she flewAnd death came, death's breath rivelled up the lies,Left bare the metal thread, the fibre fineOf truth, i' the spinning: the true words shone last.How Guido, to another purpose quite,Speaks and despairs, the last night of his life,In that New Prison by Castle AngeloAt the bridge foot: the same man, another voice.On a stone bench in a close fetid cell,Where the hot vapour of an agony,Struck into drops on the cold wall, runs down—Horrible worms made out of sweat and tears—There crouch, well nigh to the knees in dungeon-straw,Lit by the sole lamp suffered for their sake,Two awe-struck figures, this a Cardinal,That an Abate, both of old styled friendsO' the thing part man part monster in the midst,So changed is Franceschini's gentle blood.The tiger-cat screams now, that whined before,That pried and tried and trod so gingerly,Till in its silkiness the trap-teeth joined;Then you know how the bristling fury foams.They listen, this wrapped in his folds of red,While his feet fumble for the filth below;The other, as beseems a stouter heart,Working his best with beads and cross to banThe enemy that comes in like a floodSpite of the standard set up, verilyAnd in no trope at all, against him thereFor at the prison-gate, just a few stepsOutside, already, in the doubtful dawn,Thither, from this side and from that, slow sweepAnd settle down in silence solidly,Crow-wise, the frightful Brotherhood of Death.Black-hatted and black-hooded huddle they,Black rosaries a-dangling from each waist;So take they their grim station at the door,Torches lit, skull-and-cross-bones-banner spread,And that gigantic Christ with open arms,Grounded. Nor lacks there aught but that the groupBreak forth, intone the lamentable psalm,"Out of the deeps, Lord, have I cried to thee!"—When inside, from the true profound, a signShall bear intelligence that the foe is foiled,Count Guido Franceschini has confessed,And is absolved and reconciled with God.Then they, intoning, may begin their march,Make by the longest way for the People's Square,Carry the criminal to his crime's award:A mob to cleave, a scaffolding to reach,Two gallows and Mannaia crowning all.How Guido made defence a second time.

Finally, even as thus by step and stepI led you from the level of to-dayUp to the summit of so long ago,Here, whence I point you the wide prospect round—Let me, by like steps, slope you back to smooth,Land you on mother-earth, no whit the worse,To feed o' the fat o' the furrow: free to dwell,Taste our time's better things profusely spreadFor all who love the level, corn and wine,Much cattle and the many-folded fleece.Shall not my friends go feast again on sward,Though cognizant of country in the cloudsHigher than wistful eagle's horny eyeEver unclosed for, 'mid ancestral crags,When morning broke and Spring was back once more,And he died, heaven, save by his heart, unreached?Yet heaven my fancy lifts to, ladder-like,—As Jack reached, holpen of his beanstalk-rungs!

A novel country: I might make it mineBy choosing which one aspect of the yearSuited mood best, and putting solely thatOn panel somewhere in the House of Fame,Landscaping what I saved, not what I saw:—Might fix you, whether frost in goblin-timeStartled the moon with his abrupt bright laugh,Or, August's hair afloat in filmy fire,She fell, arms wide, face foremost on the world,Swooned there and so singed out the strength of things.Thus were abolished Spring and Autumn both,The land dwarfed to one likeness of the land,Life cramped corpse-fashion. Rather learn and loveEach facet-flash of the revolving year!—Red, green and blue that whirl into a white,The variance now, the eventual unity,Which make the miracle. See it for yourselves,This man's act, changeable because alive!Action now shrouds, nor shows the informing thought;Man, like a glass ball with a spark a-top,Out of the magic fire that lurks inside,Shows one tint at a time to take the eye:Which, let a finger touch the silent sleep,Shifted a hair's-breadth shoots you dark for bright,Suffuses bright with dark, and baffles soYour sentence absolute for shine or shade.Once set such orbs,—white styled, black stigmatized,—A-rolling, see them once on the other sideYour good men and your bad men every oneFrom Guido Franceschini to Guy Faux,Oft would you rub your eyes and change your names

Such, British Public, ye who like me not,(God love you!)—whom I yet have laboured for,Perchance more careful whoso runs may readThan erst when all, it seemed, could read who ran,—Perchance more careless whoso reads may praiseThan late when he who praised and read and wroteWas apt to find himself the self-same me,—Such labour had such issue, so I wroughtThis arc, by furtherance of such alloy,And so, by one spirt, take away its traceTill, justifiably golden, rounds my ring.

A ring without a posy, and that ring mine?

O lyric Love, half angel and half birdAnd all a wonder and a wild desire,—Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,Took sanctuary within the holier blue,And sang a kindred soul out to his face,—Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart—When the first summons from the darkling earthReached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,And bared them of the glory—to drop down,To toil for man, to suffer or to die,—This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!Never may I commence my song, my dueTo God who best taught song by gift of thee,Except with bent head and beseeching hand—That still, despite the distance and the dark,What was, again may be; some interchangeOf grace, some splendour once thy very thought,Some benediction anciently thy smile:—Never conclude, but raising hand and headThither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearnFor all hope, all sustainment, all reward,Their utmost up and on,—so blessing backIn those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!

XI. Guido

You are the Cardinal Acciaiuoli, and you,Abate Panciatichi—two good Tuscan names:Acciaiuoli—ah, your ancestor it wasBuilt the huge battlemented convent-blockOver the little forky flashing GreveThat takes the quick turn at the foot o' the hillJust as one first sees Florence: oh those days!'T is Ema, though, the other rivulet,The one-arched brown brick bridge yawns over,—yes,Gallop and go five minutes, and you gainThe Roman Gate from where the Ema's bridged:Kingfishers fly there: how I see the bendO'erturreted by Certosa which he built,That Senescal (we styled him) of your House!I do adjure you, help me, Sirs! My bloodComes from as far a source: ought it to endThis way, by leakage through their scaffold-planksInto Rome's sink where her red refuse runs?Sirs, I beseech you by blood-sympathy,If there be any vile experimentIn the air,—if this your visit simply prove,When all's done, just a well-intentioned trick,That tries for truth truer than truth itself,By startling up a man, ere break of day,To tell him he must die at sunset,—pshaw!That man's a Franceschini; feel his pulse,Laugh at your folly, and let's all go sleep!You have my last word,—innocent am IAs Innocent my Pope and murderer,Innocent as a babe, as Mary's own,As Mary's self,—I said, say and repeat,—And why, then, should I die twelve hours hence? I—Whom, not twelve hours ago, the gaoler badeTurn to my straw-truss, settle and sleep soundThat I might wake the sooner, promptlier payHis due of meat-and-drink-indulgence, crossHis palm with fee of the good-hand, beside,As gallants use who go at large again!For why? All honest Rome approved my part;Whoever owned wife, sister, daughter,—nay,Mistress,—had any shadow of any rightThat looks like right, and, all the more resolved,Held it with tooth and nail,—these manly menApproved! I being for Rome, Rome was for me.Then, there's the point reserved, the subterfugeMy lawyers held by, kept for last resource,Firm should all else,—the impossible fancy!—fail,And sneaking burgess-spirit win the day.The knaves! One plea at least would hold,—they laughed,—One grappling-iron scratch the bottom-rockEven should the middle mud let anchor go!I hooked my cause on to the Clergy's,—pleaWhich, even if law tipped off my hat and plume,Revealed my priestly tonsure, saved me so.The Pope moreover, this old Innocent,Being so meek and mild and merciful,So fond o' the poor and so fatigued of earth,So … fifty thousand devils in deepest hell!Why must he cure us of our strange conceitOf the angel in man's likeness, that we lovedAnd looked should help us at a pinch? He help?He pardon? Here's his mind and message—death!Thank the good Pope! Now, is he good in this,Never mind, Christian,—no such stuff's extant,—But will my death do credit to his reign,Show he both lived and let live, so was good?Cannot I live if he but like? "The law!"Why, just the law gives him the very chance,The precise leave to let my life alone,Which the archangelic soul of him (he says)Yearns after! Here they drop it in his palm,My lawyers, capital o' the cursed kind,—Drop life to take and hold and keep: but no!He sighs, shakes head, refuses to shut hand,Motions away the gift they bid him grasp,And of the coyness comes—that off I runAnd down I go, he best knows whither! mind,He knows, who sets me rolling all the same!Disinterested Vicar of our Lord,This way he abrogates and disallows,Nullifies and ignores,—reverts in fineTo the good and right, in detriment of me!Talk away! Will you have the naked truth?He's sick of his life's supper,—swallowed lies:So, hobbling bedward, needs must ease his mawJust where I sit o' the door-sill. Sir Abate,Can you do nothing? Friends, we used to frisk:What of this sudden slash in a friend's face,This cut across our good companionshipThat showed its front so gay when both were young?Were not we put into a beaten path,Bid pace the world, we nobles born and bred,We body of friends with each his scutcheon fullOf old achievement and impunity,—Taking the laugh of morn and Sol's saluteAs forth we fared, pricked on to breathe our steedsAnd take equestrian sport over the greenUnder the blue, across the crop,—what care?If we went prancing up hill and down dale,In and out of the level and the straight,By the bit of pleasant byeway, where was harm?Still Sol salutes me and the morning laughs:I see my grandsire's hoof-prints,—point the spotWhere he drew rein, slipped saddle, and stabbed knaveFor daring throw gibe—much less, stone—from pale:Then back, and on, and up with the cavalcade.Just so wend we, now canter, now converse,Till, 'mid the jauncing pride and jaunty port,Something of a sudden jerks at somebody—A dagger is out, a flashing cut and thrust,Because I play some prank my grandsire played,And here I sprawl: where is the company? Gone!A trot and a trample! only I lie trapped,Writhe in a certain novel springe just setBy the good old Pope: I'm first prize. Warn me? Why?Apprise me that the law o' the game is changed?Enough that I'm a warning, as I writhe,To all and each my fellows of the file,And make law plain henceforward past mistake,"For such a prank, death is the penalty!"Pope the Five Hundredth (what do I know or care?)Deputes your Eminency and AbateshipTo announce that, twelve hours from this time, he needsI just essay upon my body and soulThe virtue of his brand-new engine, proveRepresser of the pranksome! I'm the first!Thanks. Do you know what teeth you mean to tryThe sharpness of, on this soft neck and throat?I know it,—I have seen and hate it,—ay,As you shall, while I tell you! Let me talk,Or leave me, at your pleasure! talk I must:What is your visit but my lure to talk?Nay, you have something to disclose?—a smile,At end of the forced sternness, means to mockThe heart-beats here? I call your two hearts stone!Is your charge to stay with me till I die?Be tacit as your bench, then! Use your ears,I use my tongue: how glibly yours will runAt pleasant supper-time … God's curse! … to-nightWhen all the guests jump up, begin so brisk"Welcome, his Eminence who shrived the wretch!"Now we shall have the Abate's story!"

Life!How I could spill this overplus of mineAmong those hoar-haired, shrunk-shanked odds and endsOf body and soul old age is chewing dry!Those windlestraws that stare while purblind deathMows here, mows there, makes hay of juicy me,And misses just the bunch of withered weedWould brighten hell and streak its smoke with flame!How the life I could shed yet never shrink,Would drench their stalks with sap like grass in May!Is it not terrible, I entreat you, Sirs?—With manifold and plenitudinous life,Prompt at death's menace to give blow for threat,Answer his "Be thou not!" by "Thus I am!"—Terrible so to be alive yet die?

How I live, how I see! so,—how I speak!Lucidity of soul unlocks the lips:I never had the words at will before.How I see all my folly at a glance!"A man requires a woman and a wife:"There was my folly; I believed the saw.I knew that just myself concerned myself,Yet needs must look for what I seemed to lack,In a woman,—why, the woman's in the man!Fools we are, how we learn things when too late!Overmuch life turns round my woman-side:The male and female in me, mixed before,Settle of a sudden: I'm my wife outrightIn this unmanly appetite for truth,This careless courage as to consequence,This instantaneous sight through things and through,This voluble rhetoric, if you please,—'t is she!Here you have that Pompilia whom I slew,Also the folly for which I slew her!

Fool!And, fool-like, what is it I wander from?What did I say of your sharp iron tooth?Ah,—that I know the hateful thing! this way.I chanced to stroll forth, many a good year gone,One warm Spring eve in Rome, and unawareLooking, mayhap, to count what stars were out,Came on your fine axe in a frame, that failsAnd so cuts off a man's head underneath,Mannaia,—thus we made acquaintance first:Out of the way, in a by-part o' the town,At the Mouth-of-Truth o' the river-side, you know:One goes by the Capitol: and wherefore coy,Retiring out of crowded noisy Rome?Because a very little time agoIt had done service, chopped off head from trunkBelonging to a fellow whose poor houseThe thing must make a point to stand before—Felice Whatsoever-was-the-nameWho stabled buffaloes and so gained bread,(Our clowns unyoke them in the ground hard by)And, after use of much improper speech,Had struck at Duke Some-title-or-other's face,Because he kidnapped, carried away and keptFelice's sister who would sit and singI' the filthy doorway while she plaited fringeTo deck the brutes with,—on their gear it goes,—The good girl with the velvet in her voice.So did the Duke, so did Felice, soDid Justice, intervening with her axe.There the man-mutilating engine stoodAt ease, both gay and grim, like a Swiss guardOff duty,—purified itself as well,Getting dry, sweet and proper for next week,—And doing incidental good, 't was hopedTo the rough lesson-lacking populaceWho now and then, forsooth, must right their wrongs!There stood the twelve-foot-square of scaffold, railedConsiderately round to elbow-height,For fear an officer should tumble thenceAnd sprain his ankle and be lame a month,Through starting when the axe fell and head too!Railed likewise were the steps whereby 't was reached.All of it painted red: red, in the midst,Ran up two narrow tall beams barred across,Since from the summit, some twelve feet to reach,The iron plate with the sharp shearing edgeHad slammed, jerked, shot, slid,—I shall soon find which!—And so lay quiet, fast in its fit place,The wooden half-moon collar, now eclipsedBy the blade which blocked its curvature: apart,The other half,—the under half-moon boardWhich, helped by this, completes a neck's embrace,—Joined to a sort of desk that wheels asideOut of the way when done with,—down you kneel,In you're pushed, over you the other drops,Tight you're clipped, whiz, there's the blade cleaves its best,Out trundles body, down flops head on floor,And where's your soul gone? That, too, I shall find!This kneeling place was red, red, never fear!But only slimy-like with paint, not blood,For why? a decent pitcher stood at hand,A broad dish to hold sawdust, and a broomBy some unnamed utensil,—scraper-rake,—Each with a conscious air of duty done.Underneath, loungers,—boys and some few men,—Discoursed this platter, named the other tool,Just as, when grooms tie up and dress a steed,Boys lounge and look on, and elucubrateWhat the round brush is used for, what the square,—So was explained—to me the skill-less then—The manner of the grooming for next worldUndergone by Felice What's-his-name.There's no such lovely month in Rome as May—May's crescent is no half-moon of red plank,And came now tilting o'er the wave i' the west,One greenish-golden sea, right 'twixt those barsOf the engine—I began acquaintance with,Understood, hated, hurried from before,To have it out of sight and cleanse my soul!Here it is all again, conserved for use:Twelve hours hence, I may know more, not hate worse.

That young May-moon-month! Devils of the deep!Was not a Pope then Pope as much as now?Used not he chirrup o'er the Merry Tales,Chuckle,—his nephew so exact the wagTo play a jealous cullion such a trickAs wins the wife i' the pleasant story! Well?Why do things change? Wherefore is Rome un-Romed?I tell you, ere Felice's corpse was cold,The Duke, that night, threw wide his palace-doors,Received the compliments o' the qualityFor justice done him,—bowed and smirked his best,And in return passed round a pretty thing,A portrait of Felice's sister's self,Florid old rogue Albano's masterpiece,As—better than virginity in rags—Bouncing Europa on the back o' the bull:They laughed and took their road the safelier home.Ah, but times change, there's quite another Pope,I do the Duke's deed, take Felice's place,And, being no Felice, lout and clout,Stomach but ill the phrase "I lost my head!"How euphemistic! Lose what? Lose your ring,Your snuff-box, tablets, kerchief!—but, your head?I learnt the process at an early age;'T was useful knowledge, in those same old days,To know the way a head is set on neck.My fencing-master urged "Would you excel?"Rest not content with mere bold give-and-guard,"Nor pink the antagonist somehow-anyhow!"See me dissect a little, and know your game!"Only anatomy makes a thrust the thing."Oh Cardinal, those lithe live necks of ours!Here go the vertebræ, here's Atlas, hereAxis, and here the symphyses stop short,So wisely and well,—as, o'er a corpse, we cant,—And here's the silver cord which … what's our word?Depends from the gold bowl, which loosed (not "lost")Lets us from heaven to hell,—one chop, we're loose!"And not much pain i' the process," quoth a sage:Who told him? Not Felice's ghost, I think!Such "losing" is scarce Mother Nature's mode.She fain would have cord ease itself away,Worn to a thread by threescore years and ten,Snap while we slumber: that seems bearable.I'm told one clot of blood extravasateEnds one as certainly as Roland's sword,—One drop of lymph suffused proves Oliver's mace,—Intruding, either of the pleasant pair,On the arachnoid tunic of my brain.That's Nature's way of loosing cord!—but Art,How of Art's process with the engine here,When bowl and cord alike are crushed across,Bored between, bruised through? Why, if Fagon's self,The French Court's pride, that famed practitioner,Would pass his cold pale lightning of a knife,Pistoja-ware, adroit 'twixt joint and joint,With just a "See how facile, gentlefolk!"—The thing were not so bad to bear! Brute forceCuts as he comes, breaks in, breaks on, breaks outO' the hard and soft of you: is that the same?A lithe snake thrids the hedge, makes throb no leaf:A heavy ox sets chest to brier and branch,Bursts somehow through, and leaves one hideous holeBehind him!

And why, why must this needs be?Oh, if men were but good! They are not good,Nowise like Peter: people called him rough,But if, as I left Rome, I spoke the Saint,—"Petrus, quo vadis?"—doubtless, I should hear,"To free the prisoner and forgive his fault!"I plucked the absolute dead from God's own bar,"And raised up Dorcas,—why not rescue thee?"What would cost one such nullifying word?If Innocent succeeds to Peter's place,Let him think Peter's thought, speak Peter's speech!I say, he is bound to it: friends, how say you?Concede I be all one bloodguiltinessAnd mystery of murder in the flesh,Why should that fact keep the Pope's mouth shut fast?He execrates my crime,—good!—sees hell yawnOne inch from the red plank's end which I press,—Nothing is better! What's the consequence?How should a Pope proceed that knows his cue?Why, leave me linger out my minute here,Since close on death comes judgment and comes doom,Not crib at dawn its pittance from a sheepDestined ere dewfall to be butcher's-meat!Think, Sirs, if I have done you any harm,And you require the natural revenge,Suppose, and so intend to poison me,—Just as you take and slip into my draughtThe paperful of powder that clears scores,You notice on my brow a certain blue:How you both overset the wine at once!How you both smile! "Our enemy has the plague!"Twelve hours hence he'll be scraping his bones bare"Of that intolerable flesh, and die,"Frenzied with pain: no need for poison here!"Step aside and enjoy the spectacle!"Tender for souls are you, Pope Innocent!Christ's maxim is—one soul outweighs the world:Respite me, save a soul, then, curse the world!"No," venerable sire, I hear you smirk,"No: for Christ's gospel changes names, not things,"Renews the obsolete, does nothing more!"Our fire-new gospel is re-tinkered law,"Our mercy, justice,—Jove's rechristened God,—"Nay, whereas, in the popular conceit,"'T is pity that old harsh Law somehow limps,"Lingers on earth, although Law's day be done,"Else would benignant Gospel interpose,"Not furtively as now, but bold and frank"O'erflutter us with healing in her wings,"Law being harshness, Gospel only love—"We tell the people, on the contrary,"Gospel takes up the rod which Law lets fall;"Mercy is vigilant when justice sleeps!"Does Law permit a taste of Gospel-grace?"The secular arm allow the spiritual power"To act for once?—no compliment so fine"As that our Gospel handsomely turn harsh,"Thrust victim back on Law the nice and coy!"Yes, you do say so, else you would forgiveMe whom Law does not touch but tosses you!Don't think to put on the professional face!You know what I know: casuists as you are,Each nerve must creep, each hair start, sting and stand,At such illogical inconsequence!Dear my friends, do but see! A murder's tried,There are two parties to the cause: I'm one,—Defend myself, as somebody must do:I have the best o' the battle: that's a fact,Simple fact,—fancies find no place just now.What though half Rome condemned me? Half approved:And, none disputes, the luck is mine at last,All Rome, i' the main, acquitting me: whereon,What has the Pope to ask but "How finds Law?""I find," replies Law, "I have erred this while:"Guilty or guiltless, Guido proves a priest,"No layman: he is therefore yours, not mine:"I bound him: loose him, you whose will is Christ's!"And now what does this Vicar of our Lord,Shepherd o' the flock,—one of whose charge bleats soreFor crook's help from the quag wherein it drowns?Law suffers him employ the crumpled end:His pleasure is to turn staff, use the point,And thrust the shuddering sheep, he calls a wolf,Back and back, down and down to where hell gapes!"Guiltless," cries Law—"Guilty" corrects the Pope!"Guilty," for the whim's sake! "Guilty," he somehow thinks,And anyhow says: 't is truth; he dares not lie!

Others should do the lying. That's the causeBrings you both here: I ought in decencyConfess to you that I deserve my fate,Am guilty, as the Pope thinks,—ay, to the end,Keep up the jest, lie on, lie ever, lieI' the latest gasp of me! What reason, Sirs?Because to-morrow will succeed to-dayFor you, though not for me: and if I stickStill to the truth, declare with my last breath,I die an innocent and murdered man,—Why, there's the tongue of Rome will wag apaceThis time to-morrow: don't I hear the talk!"So, to the last he proved impenitent?"Pagans have said as much of martyred saints!"Law demurred, washed her hands of the whole case."Prince Somebody said this, Duke Something, that,"Doubtless the man's dead, dead enough, don't fear!"But, hang it, what if there have been a spice,"A touch of … eh? You see, the Pope's so old,"Some of us add, obtuse: age never slips"The chance of shoving youth to face death first!"And so on. Therefore to suppress such talkYou two come here, entreat I tell you lies,And end, the edifying way. I end,Telling the truth! Your self-styled shepherd thieves!A thief—and how thieves hate the wolves we know:Damage to theft, damage to thrift, all's one!The red hand is sworn foe of the black jaw.That's only natural, that's right enough:But why the wolf should compliment the thiefWith shepherd's title, bark out life in thanks,And, spiteless, lick the prong that spits him,—eh,Cardinal? My Abate, scarcely thus!There, let my sheepskin-garb, a curse on't, go—Leave my teeth free if I must show my shag!Repent? What good shall follow? If I passTwelve hours repenting, will that fact hold fastThe thirteenth at the horrid dozen's end?If I fall forthwith at your feet, gnash, tear,Foam, rave, to give your story the due grace,Will that assist the engine half-way backInto its hiding-house?—boards, shaking now,Bone against bone, like some old skeleton batThat wants, at winter's end, to wake and prey!Will howling put the spectre back to sleep?Ah, but I misconceive your object, Sirs!Since I want new life like the creature,—lifeBeing done with here, begins i' the world away:I shall next have "Come, mortals, and be judged!"There's but a minute betwixt this and then:So, quick, be sorry since it saves my soul!Sirs, truth shall save it, since no lies assist!Hear the truth, you, whatever you style yourselves,Civilization and society!Come, one good grapple, I with all the world!Dying in cold blood is the desperate thing;The angry heart explodes, bears off in blazeThe indignant soul, and I'm combustion-ripe.Why, you intend to do your worst with me!That's in your eyes! You dare no more than death,And mean no less. I must make up my mind.So Pietro,—when I chased him here and there,Morsel by morsel cut away the lifeI loathed,—cried for just respite to confessAnd save his soul: much respite did I grant!Why grant me respite who deserve my doom?Me—who engaged to play a prize, fight you,Knowing your arms, and foil you, trick for trick,At rapier-fence, your match and, maybe, more.I knew that if I chose sin certain sins,Solace my lusts out of the regular wayPrescribed me, I should find you in the path,Have to try skill with a redoubted foe;You would lunge, I would parry, and make end.At last, occasion of a murder comes:We cross blades, I, for all my brag, break guard,And in goes the cold iron at my breast,Out at my back, and end is made of me.You stand confessed the adroiter swordsman,—ay,But on your triumph you increase, it seems,Want more of me than lying flat on face:I ought to raise my ruined head, allegeNot simply I pushed worse blade o' the pair,But my antagonist dispensed with steel!There was no passage of arms, you looked me low,With brow and eye abolished cut and thrustNor used the vulgar weapon! This chance scratch,This incidental hurt, this sort of holeI' the heart of me? I stumbled, got it so!Fell on my own sword as a bungler may!Yourself proscribe such heathen tools, and trustTo the naked virtue: it was virtue stoodUnarmed and awed me,—on my brow there burnedCrime out so plainly intolerably red,That I was fain to cry—"Down to the dust"With me, and bury there brow, brand and all!"Law had essayed the adventure,—but what's Law?Morality exposed the Gorgon shield!Morality and Religion conquer me.If Law sufficed would you come here, entreatI supplement law, and confess forsooth?Did not the Trial show things plain enough?"Ah, but a word of the man's very self"Would somehow put the keystone in its place"And crown the arch!" Then take the word you want!

I say that, long ago, when things began,All the world made agreement, such and suchWere pleasure-giving profit-bearing acts,But henceforth extra-legal, nor to be:You must not kill the man whose death would pleaseAnd profit you, unless his life stop yoursPlainly, and need so be put aside:Get the thing by a public course, by law,Only no private bloodshed as of old!All of us, for the good of every one,Renounced such licence and conformed to law:Who breaks law, breaks pact therefore, helps himselfTo pleasure and profit over and above the due,And must pay forfeit,—pain beyond his share:For, pleasure being the sole good in the world,Anyone's pleasure turns to someone's pain,So, law must watch for everyone,—say we,Who call things wicked that give too much joy,And nickname mere reprisal, envy makes,Punishment: quite right! thus the world goes round.I, being well aware such pact there was,I, in my time who found advantage comeOf law's observance and crime's penalty,—Who, but for wholesome fear law bred in friends,Had doubtless given example long ago,Furnished forth some friend's pleasure with my pain,And, by my death, pieced out his scanty life,—I could not, for that foolish life of me,Help risking law's infringement,—I broke bond,And needs must pay price,—wherefore, here's my head,Flung with a flourish! But, repentance too?But pure and simple sorrow for law's breachRather than blunderer's-ineptitude?Cardinal, no! Abate, scarcely thus!'T is the fault, not that I dared try a fallWith Law and straightway am found undermost,But that I failed to see, above man's law,God's precept you, the Christians, recognize?Colly my cow! Don't fidget, Cardinal!Abate, cross your breast and count your beadsAnd exorcize the devil, for here he standsAnd stiffens in the bristly nape of neck,Daring you drive him hence! You, Christians both?I say, if ever was such faith at allBorn in the world, by your communitySuffered to live its little tick of time,'T is dead of age, now, ludicrously dead;Honour its ashes, if you be discreet,In epitaph only! For, concede its death,Allow extinction, you may boast uncheckedWhat feats the thing did in a crazy landAt a fabulous epoch,—treat your faith, that way,Just as you treat your relics: "Here's a shred"Of saintly flesh, a scrap of blessed bone,"Raised King Cophetua, who was dead, to life"In Mesopotamy twelve centuries since,"Such was its virtue!"—twangs the Sacristan,Holding the shrine-box up, with hands like feetBecause of gout in every finger joint:Does he bethink him to reduce one knob,Allay one twinge by touching what he vaunts?I think he half uncrooks fist to catch fee,But, for the grace, the quality of cure,—Cophetua was the man put that to proof!Not otherwise, your faith is shrined and shownAnd shamed at once: you banter while you bow!Do you dispute this? Come, a monster-laugh,A madman's laugh, allowed his CarnivalLater ten days than when all Rome, but he,Laughed at the candle-contest: mine's alight,'T is just it sputter till the puff o' the PopeEnd it to-morrow and the world turn Ash.Come, thus I wave a wand and bring to passIn a moment, in the twinkle of an eye,What but that—feigning everywhere grows fact,Professors turn possessors, realizeThe faith they play with as a fancy now,And bid it operate, have full effectOn every circumstance of life, to-day,In Rome,—faith's flow set free at fountain-head!Now, you'll own, at this present, when I speak,Before I work the wonder, there's no manWoman or child in Rome, faith's fountain-head,But might, if each were minded, realizeConversely unbelief, faith's opposite—Set it to work on life unflinchingly,Yet give no symptom of an outward change:Why should things change because men disbelieveWhat's incompatible, in the whited tomb,With bones and rottenness one inch below?What saintly act is done in Rome to-dayBut might be prompted by the devil,—"is"I say not,—"has been, and again may be,—"I do say, full i' the face o' the crucifixYou try to stop my mouth with! Off with it!Look in your own heart, if your soul have eyes!You shall see reason why, though faith were fled,Unbelief still might work the wires and moveMan, the machine, to play a faithful part.Preside your college, Cardinal, in your cape,Or,—having got above his head, grown Pope,—Abate, gird your loins and wash my feet!Do you suppose I am at loss at allWhy you crook, why you cringe, why fast or feast?Praise, blame, sit, stand, lie or go!—all of it,In each of you, purest unbelief may prompt,And wit explain to who has eyes to see.But, lo, I wave wand, made the false the true!Here's Rome believes in Christianity!What an explosion, how the fragments flyOf what was surface, mask and make-believe!Begin now,—look at this Pope's-halberdierIn wasp-like black and yellow foolery!He, doing duty at the corridor,Wakes from a muse and stands convinced of sin!Down he flings halbert, leaps the passage-length,Pushes into the presence, pantinglySubmits the extreme peril of the caseTo the Pope's self,—whom in the world beside?—And the Pope breaks talk with ambassador,Bids aside bishop, wills the whole world waitTill he secure that prize, outweighs the world,A soul, relieve the sentry of his qualm!His Altitude the Referendary,—Robed right, and ready for the usher's wordTo pay devoir,—is, of all times, just then'Ware of a master-stroke of argumentWill cut the spinal cord … ugh, ugh! … I mean,Paralyse Molinism for evermore!Straight he leaves lobby, trundles, two and two,Down steps to reach home, write, if but a wordShall end the impudence: he leaves who likesGo pacify the Pope: there's Christ to serve!How otherwise would men display their zeal?If the same sentry had the least surmiseA powder-barrel 'neath the pavement layIn neighbourhood with what might prove a match,Meant to blow sky-high Pope and presence both—Would he not break through courtiers, rank and file,Bundle up, bear off and save body so,The Pope, no matter for his priceless soul?There's no fool's-freak here, nought to soundly swinge,Only a man in earnest, you'll so praiseAnd pay and prate about, that earth shall ring!Had thought possessed the ReferendaryHis jewel-case at home was left ajar,What would be wrong in running, robes awry,To be beforehand with the pilferer?What talk then of indecent haste? Which means,That both these, each in his degree, would doJust that,—for a comparative nothing's sake,And thereby gain approval and reward,—Which, done for what Christ says is worth the world,Procures the doer curses, cuffs and kicks.I call such difference 'twixt act and act,Sheer lunacy unless your truth on lipBe recognized a lie in heart of you!How do you all act, promptly or in doubt,When there's a guest poisoned at supper-timeAnd he sits chatting on with spot on cheek?"Pluck him by the skirt, and round him in the ears,"Have at him by the beard, warn anyhow!"Good, and this other friend that's cheat and thiefAnd dissolute,—go stop the devil's feast,Withdraw him from the imminent hell-fire!Why, for your life, you dare not tell your friend"You lie, and I admonish you for Christ!"Who yet dare seek that same man at the MassTo warn him—on his knees, and tinkle near,—He left a cask a-tilt, a tap unturned,The Trebbian running: what a grateful jumpOut of the Church rewards your vigilance!Perform that self-same service just a thoughtMore maladroitly,—since a bishop sitsAt function!—and he budges not, bites lip,—"You see my case: how can I quit my post?"He has an eye to any such default."See to it, neighbour, I beseech your love!"He and you know the relative worth of things,What is permissible or inopportune.Contort your brows! You know I speak the truth:Gold is called gold, and dross called dross, i' the Book:Gold you let lie and dross pick up and prize!—Despite your muster of some fifty monksAnd nuns a-maundering here and mumping there,Who could, and on occasion would, spurn dross,Clutch gold, and prove their faith a fact so far,—I grant you! Fifty times the number squeakAnd gibber in the madhouse—firm of faith,This fellow, that his nose supports the moon;The other, that his straw hat crowns him Pope:Does that prove all the world outside insane?Do fifty miracle-mongers match the mobThat acts on the frank faithless principle,Born-baptized-and-bred Christian-atheists, eachWith just as much a right to judge as you,—As many senses in his soul, and nervesI' neck of him as I,—whom, soul and sense,Neck and nerve, you abolish presently,—I being the unit in creation nowWho pay the Maker, in this speech of mine,A creature's duty, spend my last of breathIn bearing witness, even by my worst fault,To the creature's obligation, absolute,Perpetual: my worst fault protests, "The faith"Claims all of me: I would give all she claims,"But for a spice of doubt: the risk's too rash:"Double or quits, I play, but, all or nought,"Exceeds my courage: therefore, I descend"To the next faith with no dubiety—"Faith in the present life, made last as long"And prove as full of pleasure as may hap,"Whatever pain it cause the world." I'm wrong?I've had my life, whate'er I lose: I'm right?I've got the single good there was to gain.Entire faith, or else complete unbelief!Aught between has my loathing and contempt,Mine and God's also, doubtless: ask yourself,Cardinal, where and how you like a man!Why, either with your feet upon his head,Confessed your caudatory, or, at large,The stranger in the crowd who caps to youBut keeps his distance,—why should he presume?You want no hanger-on and dropper-off,Now yours, and now not yours but quite his own,According as the sky looks black or bright.Just so I capped to and kept off from faith—You promised trudge behind through fair and foul,Yet leave i' the lurch at the first spit of rain.Who holds to faith whenever rain begins?What does the father when his son lies dead,The merchant when his money-bags take wing,The politician whom a rival ousts?No case but has its conduct, faith prescribes:Where's the obedience that shall edify?Why, they laugh frankly in the face of faithAnd take the natural course,—this rends his hairBecause his child is taken to God's breast.That gnashes teeth and raves at loss of trashWhich rust corrupts and thieves break through and steal,And this, enabled to inherit earthThrough meekness, curses till your blood runs cold!Down they all drop to my low level, restHeart upon dungy earth that's warm and soft,And let who please attempt the altitudes.Each playing prodigal son of heavenly sire,Turning his nose up at the fatted calf,Fain to fill belly with the husks, we swineDid eat by born depravity of taste!

Enough of the hypocrites. But you, Sirs, you—Who never budged from litter where I lay,And buried snout i' the draff-box while I fed,Cried amen to my creed's one article—"Get pleasure, 'scape pain,—give your preference"To the immediate good, for time is brief,"And death ends good and ill and everything!"What's got is gained, what's gained soon is gained twice,"And,—inasmuch as faith gains most,—feign faith!"So did we brother-like pass word about:—You, now,—like bloody drunkards but half-drunk,Who fool men yet perceive men find them fools,—Vexed that a titter gains the gravest mouth,—O' the sudden you must needs re-introduceSolemnity, straight sober undue mirthBy a blow dealt me your boon companion hereWho, using the old licence, dreamed of harmNo more than snow in harvest: yet it falls!You check the merriment effectuallyBy pushing your abrupt machine i' the midst,Making me Rome's example: blood for wine!The general good needs that you chop and change!I may dislike the hocus-pocus,—Rome,The laughter-loving people, won't they stareChap-fallen!—while serious natures sermonize"The magistrate, he beareth not the sword"In vain; who sins may taste its edge, we see!"Why my sin, drunkards? Where have I abusedLiberty, scandalized you all so much?Who called me, who crooked finger till I came,Fool that I was, to join companionship?I knew my own mind, meant to live my life,Elude your envy, or else make a stand,Take my own part and sell you my life dear.But it was "Fie! No prejudice in the world"To the proper manly instinct! Cast your lot"Into our lap, one genius ruled our births,"We'll compass joy by concert; take with us"The regular irregular way i' the wood;"You'll miss no game through riding breast by breast,"In this preserve, the Church's park and pale,"Rather than outside where the world lies waste!"Come, if you said not that, did you say this?Give plain and terrible warning, "Live, enjoy?"Such life begins in death and ends in hell!"Dare you bid us assist your sins, us priests"Who hurry sin and sinners from the earth?"No such delight for us, why then for you?"Leave earth, seek heaven or find its opposite!"Had you so warned me, not in lying wordsBut veritable deeds with tongues of flame,That had been fair, that might have struck a man,Silenced the squabble between soul and sense,Compelled him to make mind up, take one courseOr the other, peradventure!—wrong or right,Foolish or wise, you would have been at leastSincere, no question,—forced me choose, indulgeOr else renounce my instincts, still play wolfOr find my way submissive to your fold,Be red-crossed on my fleece, one sheep the more.But you as good as bade me wear sheep's woolOver wolf's skin, suck blood and hide the noiseBy mimicry of something like a bleat,—Whence it comes that because, despite my care,Because I smack my tongue too loud for once,Drop baaing, here's the village up in arms!Have at the wolfs throat, you who hate the breed!Oh, were it only open yet to choose—One little time more—whether I'd be freeYour foe, or subsidized your friend forsooth!Should not you get a growl through the white fangsIn answer to your beckoning! Cardinal,Abate, managers o' the multitude,I'd turn your gloved hands to account, be sure!You should manipulate the coarse rough mob:'T is you I'd deal directly with, not them,—Using your fears: why touch the thing myselfWhen I could see you hunt, and then cry "Shares!"Quarter the carcase or we quarrel; come,"Here's the world ready to see justice done!"Oh, it had been a desperate game, but gameWherein the winner's chance were worth the pains!We'd try conclusions!—at the worst, what worseThan this Mannaia-machine, each minute's talkHelps push an inch the nearer me? Fool, fool!

You understand me and forgive, sweet Sirs?I blame you, tear my hair and tell my woe—All's but a flourish, figure of rhetoric!One must try each expedient to save life.One makes fools look foolisher fifty-foldBy putting in their place men wise like you,To take the full force of an argumentWould buffet their stolidity in vain.If you should feel aggrieved by the mere windO' the blow that means to miss you and maul them,That's my success! Is it not folly, now,To say with folk, "A plausible defence—"We see through notwithstanding, and reject?"Reject the plausible they do, these fools,Who never even make pretence to showOne point beyond its plausibilityIn favour of the best belief they hold!"Saint Somebody-or-other raised the dead:"Did he? How do you come to know as much?"Know it, what need? The story's plausible,"Avouched for by a martyrologist,"And why should good men sup on cheese and leeks"On such a saint's day, if there were no saint?"I praise the wisdom of these fools, and straightTell them my story—"plausible, but false!"False, to be sure! What else can story beThat runs—a young wife tired of an old spouse,Found a priest whom she fled away with,—bothTook their full pleasure in the two-days' flight,Which a grey-headed greyer-hearted pair,(Whose best boast was, their life had been a lie)Helped for the love they bore all liars. Oh,Here incredulity begins! Indeed?Allow then, were no one point strictly true,There's that i' the tale might seem like truth at leastTo the unlucky husband,—jaundiced patch—Jealousy maddens people, why not him?Say, he was maddened, so forgivable!Humanity pleads that though the wife were true,The priest true, and the pair of liars true,They might seem false to one man in the world!A thousand gnats make up a serpent's sting,And many sly soft stimulants to wrathCompose a formidable wrong at lastThat gets called easily by some one nameNot applicable to the single parts,And so draws down a general revenge,Excessive if you take crime, fault by fault.Jealousy! I have known a score of plays,Were listened to and laughed at in my timeAs like the everyday-life on all sides,Wherein the husband, mad as a March hare,Suspected all the world contrived his shame.What did the wife? The wife kissed both eyes blind,Explained away ambiguous circumstance,And while she held him captive by the hand,Crowned his head,—you know what's the mockery,—By half her body behind the curtain. That'sNature now! That's the subject of a pieceI saw in Vallombrosa Convent, madeExpressly to teach men what marriage was!But say "Just so did I misapprehend,"Imagine she deceived me to my face,"And that's pretence too easily seen through!All those eyes of all husbands in all plays,At stare like one expanded peacock-tail,Are laughed at for pretending to be keenWhile horn-blind: but the moment I step forth—Oh, I must needs o' the sudden prove a lynxAnd look the heart, that stone-wall, through and through!Such an eye, God's may be,—not yours nor mine.

Yes, presently . . what hour is fleeting now?When you cut earth away from under me,I shall be left alone with, pushed beneathSome such an apparitional dread orbAs the eye of God, since such an eye there glares:I fancy it go filling up the voidAbove my mote-self it devours, or whatProves—wrath, immensity wreaks on nothingness.Just how I felt once, couching through the dark,Hard by Vittiano; young I was, and gay,And wanting to trap fieldfares: first a sparkTipped a bent, as a mere dew-globule mightAny stiff grass-stalk on the meadow,—thisGrew fiercer, flamed out full, and proved the sun.What do I want with proverbs, precepts here?Away with man! What shall I say to God?This, if I find the tongue and keep the mind—"Do Thou wipe out the being of me, and smear"This soul from off Thy white of things, I blot!"I am one huge and sheer mistake,—whose fault?"Not mine at least, who did not make myself!"Someone declares my wife excused me so!Perhaps she knew what argument to use.Grind your teeth, Cardinal: Abate, writhe!What else am I to cry out in my rage,Unable to repent one particleO' the past? Oh, how I wish some cold wise manWould dig beneath the surface which you scrape,Deal with the depths, pronounce on my desertGroundedly! I want simple sober sense,That asks, before it finishes with a dog,Who taught the dog that trick you hang him for?You both persist to call that act a crime,Which sense would call ... yes, I maintain it, Sirs,...A blunder! At the worst, I stood in doubtOn cross-road, took one path of many paths:It leads to the red thing, we all see now,But nobody saw at first: one primrose-patchIn bank, one singing-bird in bush, the less,Had warned me from such wayfare: let me prove!Put me back to the cross-road, start afresh!Advise me when I take the first false step!Give me my wife: how should I use my wife,Love her or hate her? Prompt my action now!There she is, there she stands alive and pale,The thirteen-years' old child, with milk for blood,Pompilia Comparini, as at first,Which first is only four brief years ago!I stand too in the little ground-floor roomO' the father's house at Via Vittoria: see!Her so-called mother,—one arm round the waistO' the child to keep her from the toys, let fallAt wonder I can live yet look so grim,—Ushers her in, with deprecating waveOf the other,—and she fronts me loose at last,Held only by the mother's finger-tip.Struck dumb,—for she was white enough before!—She eyes me with those frightened balls of black,As heifer—the old simile comes pat—Eyes tremblingly the altar and the priest.The amazed look, all one insuppressive prayer,—Might she but breathe, set free as heretofore,Have this cup leave her lips unblistered, bearAny cross anywhither anyhow,So but alone, so but apart from me!You are touched? So am I, quite otherwise,If 't is with pity. I resent my wrong,Being a man: I only show man's soulThrough man's flesh: she sees mine, it strikes her thus!Is that attractive? To a youth perhaps—Calf-creature, one-part boy to three-parts girl,To whom it is a flattering noveltyThat he, men use to motion from their path,Can thus impose, thus terrify in turnA chit whose terror shall be changed apaceTo bliss unbearable when grace and glow,Prowess and pride descend the throne and touchEsther in all that pretty tremble, curedBy the dove o' the sceptre! But myself am old,O' the wane at least, in all things: what do you sayTo her who frankly thus confirms my doubt?I am past the prime, I scare the woman-world,Done-with that way: you like this piece of news?A little saucy rose-bud minx can strikeDeath-damp into the breast of doughty kingThough 't were French Louis,—soul I understand,—Saying, by gesture of repugnance, just"Sire, you are regal, puissant and so forth,"But—young you have been, are not, nor will be!"In vain the mother nods, winks, bustles up,"Count, girls incline to mature worth like you!"As for Pompilia, what's flesh, fish, or fowl"To one who apprehends no difference,"And would accept you even were you old"As you are … youngish by her father's side?"Trim but your beard a little, thin your bush"Of eyebrow; and for presence, portliness,"And decent gravity, you beat a boy!"Deceive yourself one minute, if you may,In presence of the child that so loves age,Whose neck writhes, cords itself against your kiss,Whose hand you wring stark, rigid with despair!Well, I resent this; I am young in soul,Nor old in body,—thews and sinews here,—Though the vile surface be not smooth as once,—Far beyond that first wheelwork which went wrongThrough the untempered iron ere 't was proof:I am the wrought man worth ten times the crude,Would woman see what this declines to see,Declines to say "I see,"—the officious wordThat makes the thing, pricks on the soul to shootNew fire into the half-used cinder, flesh!Therefore 't is she begins with wronging me,Who cannot but begin with hating her.Our marriage follows: there she stands again!Why do I laugh? Why, in the very gripeO' the jaws of death's gigantic skull, do IGrin back his grin, make sport of my own pangs?Why from each clashing of his molars, groundTo make the devil bread from out my grist,Leaps out a spark of mirth, a hellish toy?Take notice we are lovers in a church,Waiting the sacrament to make us oneAnd happy! Just as bid, she bears herself,Comes and kneels, rises, speaks, is silent,—goes:So have I brought my horse, by word and blow,To stand stock-still and front the fire he dreads.How can I other than remember this,Resent the very obedience? Gain thereby?Yes, I do gain my end and have my will,—Thanks to whom? When the mother speaks the word,She obeys it—even to enduring me!There had been compensation in revolt—Revolt's to quell: but martyrdom rehearsed,But predetermined saintship for the sakeO' the mother?—"Go!" thought I, "we meet again!"Pass the next weeks of dumb contented death,She lives,—wakes up, installed in house and home,Is mine, mine all day-long, all night-long mine.Good folk begin at me with open mouth"Now, at least, reconcile the child to life!"Study and make her love … that is, endure"The … hem! the … all of you though somewhat old,"Till it amount to something, in her eye,"As good as love, better a thousand times,—"Since nature helps the woman in such strait,"Makes passiveness her pleasure: failing which,"What if you give up boy-and-girl-fools'-play"And go on to wise friendship all at once?"Those boys and girls kiss themselves cold, you know,"Toy themselves tired and slink aside full soon"To friendship, as they name satiety:"Thither go you and wait their coming!" Thanks,Considerate advisers,—but, fair play!Had you and I, friends, started fair at firstWe, keeping fair, might reach it, neck by neck,This blessed goal, whenever fate so please:But why am I to miss the daisied mileThe course begins with, why obtain the dustOf the end precisely at the starting-point?Why quaff life's cup blown free of all the beads,The bright red froth wherein our beard should steepBefore our mouth essay the black o' the wine?Foolish, the love-fit? Let me prove it suchLike you, before like you I puff things clear!"The best's to come, no rapture but content!"Not love's first glory but a sober glow,"Not a spontaneous outburst in pure boon,"So much as, gained by patience, care and toil,"Proper appreciation and esteem!"Go preach that to your nephews, not to meWho, tired i' the midway of my life, would stopAnd take my first refreshment, pluck a rose:What's this coarse woolly hip, worn smooth of leaf,You counsel I go plant in garden-plot,Water with tears, manure with sweat and blood,In confidence the seed shall germinateAnd, for its very best, some far-off day,Grow big, and blow me out a dog-rose bell?Why must your nephews begin breathing spiceO' the hundred-petalled Provence prodigy?Nay, more and worse,—would such my root bear rose—Prove really flower and favourite, not the kindThat's queen, but those three leaves that make one cupAnd hold the hedge-bird's breakfast,—then indeedThe prize though poor would pay the care and toil!Respect we Nature that makes least as most,Marvellous in the minim! But this bud,Bit through and burned black by the tempter's tooth,This bloom whose best grace was the slug outsideAnd the wasp inside its bosom,—call you "rose"?Claim no immunity from a weed's fateFor the horrible present! What you call my wifeI call a nullity in female shape,Vapid disgust, soon to be pungent plague,When mixed with, made confusion and a curseBy two abominable nondescripts,That father and that mother: think you seeThe dreadful bronze our boast, we Aretines,The Etruscan monster, the three-headed thing,Bellerophon's foe! How name you the whole beast?You choose to name the body from one head,That of the simple kid which droops the eye,Hangs the neck and dies tenderly enough:I rather see the griesly lion belchFlame out i' the midst, the serpent writhe her rings,Grafted into the common stock for tail,And name the brute, Chimæra which I slew!How was there ever more to be—(concedeMy wife's insipid harmless nullity)—Dissociation from that pair of plagues—That mother with her cunning and her cant—The eyes with first their twinkle of conceit,Then, dropped to earth in mock-demureness,—now,The smile self-satisfied from ear to ear,Now, the prim pursed-up mouth's protruded lips,With deferential duck, slow swing of head,Tempting the sudden fist of man too much,—That owl-like screw of lid and rock of ruff!As for the father,—Cardinal, you know,The kind of idiot!—such are rife in Rome,But they wear velvet commonly; good fools,At the end of life, to furnish forth young folkWho grin and bear with imbecility:Since the stalled ass, the joker, sheds from jawCorn, in the joke, for those who laugh or starve.But what say we to the same solemn beastWagging his ears and wishful of our pat,When turned, with holes in hide and bones laid bare,To forage for himself i' the waste o' the world,Sir Dignity i' the dumps? Pat him? We drubSelf-knowledge, rather, into frowzy pate,Teach Pietro to get trappings or go hang!Fancy this quondam oracle in vogueAt Via Vittoria, this personifiedAuthority when time was,—PantaloonFlaunting his tom-fool tawdry just the sameAs if Ash-Wednesday were mid-Carnival!That's the extreme and unforgiveableOf sins, as I account such. Have you stoopedFor your own ends to bestialize yourselfBy flattery of a fellow of this stamp?The ends obtained or else shown out of reach,He goes on, takes the flattery for pure truth,—"You love, and honour me, of course: what next?"What, but the trifle of the stabbing, friend?—Which taught you how one worships when the shrineHas lost the relic that we bent before.Angry! And how could I be otherwise?'T is plain: this pair of old pretentious foolsMeant to fool me: it happens, I fooled them.Why could not these who sought to buy and sellMe,—when they found themselves were bought and sold,Make up their mind to the proved rule of right,Be chattel and not chapman any more?Miscalculation has its consequence;But when the shepherd crooks a sheep-like thingAnd meaning to get wool, dislodges fleeceAnd finds the veritable wolf beneath,(How that staunch image serves at every turn!)Does he, by way of being politic,Pluck the first whisker grimly visible?Or rather grow in a trice all gratitude,Protest this sort-of-what-one-might-name sheepBeats the old other curly-coated kind,And shall share board and bed, if so it deign,With its discoverer, like a royal ram?Ay, thus, with chattering teeth and knocking knees,Would wisdom treat the adventure! these, forsooth,Tried whisker-plucking, and so found what trapThe whisker kept perdue, two rows of teeth—Sharp, as too late the prying fingers felt.What would you have? The fools transgress, the foolsForthwith receive appropriate punishment:They first insult me, I return the blow,There follows noise enough: four hubbub months,Now hue and cry, now whimpering and wail—A perfect goose-yard cackle of complaintBecause I do not gild the geese their oats,—I have enough of noise, ope wicket wide,Sweep out the couple to go whine elsewhere,Frightened a little, hurt in no respect,And am just taking thought to breathe again,Taste the sweet sudden silence all about,When, there they raise it, the old noise I know,At Rome i' the distance! "What, begun once more?"Whine on, wail ever, 't is the loser's right!"But eh, what sort of voice grows on the wind?Triumph it sounds and no complaint at all!And triumph it is. My boast was premature:The creatures, I turned forth, clapped wing and crewFighting-cock-fashion,—they had filched a pearlFrom dung-heap, and might boast with cause enough!I was defrauded of all bargained for:You know, the Pope knows, not a soul but knowsMy dowry was derision, my gain—muck,My wife, (the Church declared my flesh and blood)The nameless bastard of a common whore:My old name turned henceforth to … shall I say"He that received the ordure in his face?"And they who planned this wrong, performed this wrong,And then revealed this wrong to the wide world,Rounded myself in the ears with my own wrong,—Why, these were (note hell's lucky malice, now!)These were just they who, they alone, could actAnd publish and proclaim their infamy,Secure that men would in a breath believeCompassionate and pardon them,—for why?They plainly were too stupid to invent,Too simple to distinguish wrong from right,—Inconscious agents they, the silly-sooth,Of heaven's retributive justice on the strongProud cunning violent oppressor—me!Follow them to their fate and help your best,You Rome, Arezzo, foes called friends of me,They gave the good long laugh to, at my cost!Defray your share o' the cost, since you partookThe entertainment! Do!—assured the while,That not one stab, I dealt to right and left,But went the deeper for a fancy—this—That each might do me two-fold service, findA friend's face at the bottom of each wound,And scratch its smirk a little!

Panciatichi!There's a report at Florence,—is it true?—That when your relative the CardinalBuilt, only the other day, that barrack-bulk,The palace in Via Larga, someone pickedFrom out the street a saucy quip enoughThat fell there from its day's flight through the town,About the flat front and the windows wideAnd bulging heap of cornice,—hitched the jokeInto a sonnet, signed his name thereto,And forthwith pinned on post the pleasantry:For which he's at the galleys, rowing nowUp to his waist in water,—just becausePanciatic and lymphatic rhymed so pat!I hope, Sir, those who passed this joke on meWere not unduly punished? What say you,Prince of the Church, my patron? Nay, indeed,I shall not dare insult your wits so muchAs think this problem difficult to solve.This Pietro and Violante then, I say,These two ambiguous insects, changing nameAnd nature with the season's warmth or chill,—Now, grovelled, grubbing toiling moiling ants,A very synonym of thrift and peace,—Anon, with lusty June to prick their heart,Soared i' the air, winged flies for more offence,Circled me, buzzed me deaf and stung me blind,And stunk me dead with fetor in the faceUntil I stopped the nuisance: there's my crime!Pity I did not suffer them subsideInto some further shape and final formOf execrable life? My masters, no!I, by one blow, wisely cut short at onceThem and their transformations of disgust,In the snug little Villa out of hand."Grant me confession, give bare time for that!"—Shouted the sinner till his mouth was stopped.His life confessed!—that was enough for me,Who came to see that he did penance. 'S death!Here's a coil raised, a pother and for what?Because strength, being provoked by weakness, foughtAnd conquered,—the world never heard the like!Pah, how I spend my breath on them, as if'T was their fate troubled me, too hard to rangeAmong the right and fit and proper things!

Ay, but Pompilia,—I await your word,—She, unimpeached of crime, unimplicateIn folly, one of alien blood to theseI punish, why extend my claim, exactHer portion of the penalty? Yes, friends,I go too fast: the orator's at fault:Yes, ere I lay her, with your leave, by themAs she was laid at San Lorenzo late,I ought to step back, lead you by degrees,Recounting at each step some fresh offence,Up to the red bed,—never fear, I will!Gaze at her, where I place her, to begin,Confound me with her gentleness and worth!The horrible pair have fled and left her now,She has her husband for her sole concern:His wife, the woman fashioned for his help,Flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone, the brideTo groom as is the Church and Spouse to Christ:There she stands in his presence: "Thy desire"Shall be to the husband, o'er thee shall he rule!"—"Pompilia, who declare that you love God,"You know who said that: then, desire my love,"Yield me contentment and be ruled aright!"She sits up, she lies down, she comes and goes,Kneels at the couch-side, overleans the sillO' the window, cold and pale and mute as stone,Strong as stone also. "Well, are they not fled?"Am I not left, am I not one for all?"Speak a word, drop a tear, detach a glance,"Bless me or curse me of your own accord!"Is it the ceiling only wants your soul,"Is worth your eyes?" And then the eyes descend,And do look at me. Is it at the meal?"Speak!" she obeys, "Be silent!" she obeys,Counting the minutes till I cry "Depart,"As brood-bird when you saunter past her eggs.Departs she? just the same through door and wallI see the same stone strength of white despair.And all this will be never otherwise!Before, the parents' presence lent her life:She could play off her sex's armoury,Entreat, reproach, be female to my male,Try all the shrieking doubles of the hare,Go clamour to the Commissary, bidThe Archbishop hold my hands and stop my tongue,And yield fair sport so: but the tactics change,The hare stands stock-still to enrage the hound!Since that day when she learned she was no childOf those she thought her parents,—that their trickHad tricked me whom she thought sole trickster late,—Why, I suppose she said within herself"Then, no more struggle for my parents' sake!"And, for my own sake, why needs struggle be?"But is there no third party to the pact?What of her husband's relish or dislikeFor this new game of giving up the game,This worst offence of not offending more?I'll not believe but instinct wrought in this,Set her on to conceive and executeThe preferable plague: how sure they probe—These jades, the sensitivest soft of man!The long black hair was wound now in a wisp,Crowned sorrow better than the wild web late:No more soiled dress, 't is trimness triumphs now,For how should malice go with negligence?The frayed silk looked the fresher for her spite!There was an end to springing out of bed,Praying me, with face buried on my feet,Be hindered of my pastime,—so an endTo my rejoinder, "What, on the ground at last?'Vanquished in fight, a supplicant for life?"What if I raise you? 'Ware the casting down"When next you fight me!" Then, she lay there, mine:Now, mine she is if I please wring her neck,—A moment of disquiet, working eyes,Protruding tongue, a long sigh, then no more,—As if one killed the horse one could not ride!Had I enjoined "Cut off the hair!"—why, snapThe scissors, and at once a yard or soHad fluttered in black serpents to the floor:But till I did enjoin it, how she combs,Uncurls and draws out to the complete length,Plaits, places the insulting rope on headTo be an eyesore past dishevelment!Is all done? Then sit still again and stare!I advise—no one think to bear that lookOf steady wrong, endured as steadily—Through what sustainment of deluding hope?Who is the friend i' the background that notes all?Who may come presently and close accounts?This self-possession to the uttermost,How does it differ in aught, save degree,From the terrible patience of God?

"All which just means,"She did not love you!" Again the word is launchedAnd the fact fronts me! What, you try the wardsWith the true key and the dead lock flies ope?No, it sticks fast and leaves you fumbling still!You have some fifty servants, Cardinal,—Which of them loves you? Which subordinateBut makes parade of such officiousnessThat,—if there's no love prompts it,—love, the sham,Does twice the service done by love, the true.God bless us liars, where's one touch of truthIn what we tell the world, or world tells us,Of how we love each other? All the same,We calculate on word and deed, nor err,—Bid such a man do such a loving act,Sure of effect and negligent of cause,Just as we bid a horse, with cluck of tongue,Stretch his legs arch-wise, crouch his saddled backTo foot-reach of the stirrup—all for love,And some for memory of the smart of switchOn the inside of the foreleg—what care we?Yet where's the bond obliges horse to manLike that which binds fast wife to husband? GodLaid down the law: gave man the brawny armAnd ball of fist—woman the beardless cheekAnd proper place to suffer in the side:Since it is he can strike, let her obey!Can she feel no love? Let her show the more,Sham the worse, damn herself praiseworthily!Who's that soprano, Rome went mad aboutLast week while I lay rotting in my straw?The very jailer gossiped in his praise—How,—dressed up like Armida, though a man;And painted to look pretty, though a fright,—He still made love so that the ladies swooned,Being an eunuch. "Ah, Rinaldo mine!"But to breathe by thee while Jove slays us both!All the poor bloodless creature never felt,Si, do, re, mi, fa, squeak and squall—for what?Two gold zecchines the evening. Here's my slave,Whose body and soul depend upon my nod,Can't falter out the first note in the scaleFor her life! Why blame me if I take the life?All women cannot give men love, forsooth!No, nor all pullets lay the henwife eggs—Whereat she bids them remedy the fault,Brood on a chalk-ball: soon the nest is stocked—Otherwise, to the plucking and the spit!This wife of mine was of another mood—Would not begin the lie that ends with truth,Nor feign the love that brings real love about:Wherefore I judged, sentenced and punished herBut why particularize, defend the deed?Say that I hated her for no one causeBeyond my pleasure so to do,—what then?Just on as much incitement acts the world,All of you! Look and like! You favour oneBrowbeat another, leave alone a third,—Why should you master natural caprice?Pure nature Try: plant elm by ash in file;Both unexceptionable trees enough,They ought to overlean each other, pairAt top, and arch across the avenueThe whole path to the pleasaunce: do they so—Or loathe, lie off abhorrent each from each?Lay the fault elsewhere: since we must have faults,Mine shall have been,—seeing there's ill in the endCome of my course,—that I fare somehow worseFor the way I took: my fault … as God's my judge,I see not where my fault lies, that's the truth!I ought … oh, ought in my own interestHave let the whole adventure go untried,This chance by marriage: or else, trying it,Ought to have turned it to account, some oneO' the hundred otherwises? Ay, my friend,Easy to say, easy to do: step rightNow you've stepped left and stumbled on the thing,—The red thing! Doubt I any more than youThat practice makes man perfect? Give againThe chance,—same marriage and no other wife,Be sure I'll edify you! That's becauseI'm practised, grown fit guide for Guido's self.You proffered guidance,—I know, none so well,—You laid down law and rolled decorum out,From pulpit-corner on the gospel-side,—Wanted to make your great experience mine,Save me the personal search and pains so: thanks!Take your word on life's use? When I take his—The muzzled ox that treadeth out the corn,Gone blind in padding round and round one path,—As to the taste of green grass in the field!What do you know o' the world that's trodden flatAnd salted sterile with your daily dung,Leavened into a lump of loathsomeness?Take your opinion of the modes of life,The aims of life, life's triumph or defeat,How to feel, how to scheme, and how to doOr else leave undone? You preached long and loudOn high-days, "Take our doctrine upon trust!"Into the mill-house with you! Grind our corn,"Relish our chaff, and let the green grass grow!"I tried chaff, found I famished on such fare,So made this mad rush at the mill-house-door,Buried my head up to the ears in dew,Browsed on the best: for which you brain me, Sirs!Be it so. I conceived of life that way,And still declare—life, without absolute useOf the actual sweet therein, is death, not life.Give me,—pay down,—not promise, which is air,—Something that's out of life and better still,Make sure reward, make certain punishment,Entice me, scare me,—I'll forgo this life;Otherwise, no!—the less that words, mere wind,Would cheat me of some minutes while they plague,Baulk fulness of revenge here,—blame yourselvesFor this eruption of the pent-up soulYou prisoned first and played with afterward"Deny myself" meant simply pleasure you,The sacred and superior, save the mark!You,—whose stupidity and insolenceI must defer to, soothe at every turn,—Whose swine-like snuffling greed and grunting lustI had to wink at or help gratify,—While the same passions,—dared they perk in me,Me, the immeasurably marked, by God,Master of the whole world of such as you,—I, boast such passions? 'T was "Suppress them straight!"Or stay, we'll pick and choose before destroy."Here's wrath in you, a serviceable sword,—"Beat it into a ploughshare! What's this long"Lance-like ambition? Forge a pruning-hook,"May be of service when our vines grow tall!"But—sword use swordwise, spear thrust out as spear?"Anathema! Suppression is the word!"My nature, when the outrage was too gross,Widened itself an outlet over-wideBy way of answer, sought its own reliefWith more of fire and brimstone than you wished.All your own doing: preachers, blame yourselves!

'T is I preach while the hour-glass runs and runs!God keep me patient! All I say just means—My wife proved, whether by her fault or mine,—That's immaterial,—a true stumbling-blockI' the way of me her husband. I but pliedThe hatchet yourselves use to clear a path,Was politic, played the game you warrant wins,Plucked at law's robe a-rustle through the courts,Bowed down to kiss divinity's buckled shoeCushioned i' the church: efforts all wide the aim!Procedures to no purpose! Then flashed truth.The letter kills, the spirit keeps aliveIn law and gospel: there be nods and winksInstruct a wise man to assist himselfIn certain matters, nor seek aid at all."Ask money of me,"—quoth the clownish saw,—"And take my purse! But,—speaking with respect,—"Need you a solace for the troubled nose?"Let everybody wipe his own himself!"Sirs, tell me free and fair! Had things gone wellAt the wayside inn: had I surprised asleepThe runaways, as was so probable,And pinned them each to other partridge-wise,Through back and breast to breast and back, then badeBystanders witness if the spit, my sword,Were loaded with unlawful game for once—Would you have interposed to damp the glowApplauding me on every husband's cheek?Would you have checked the cry "A judgment, see!"A warning, note! Be henceforth chaste, ye wives,"Nor stray beyond your proper precinct, priests!"If you had, then your house against itselfDivides, nor stands your kingdom any more.Oh why, why was it not ordained just so?Why fell not things out so nor otherwise?Ask that particular devil whose task it isTo trip the all-but-at perfection,—slurThe line o' the painter just where paint leaves offAnd life begins,—put ice into the odeO' the poet while he cries "Next stanza—fire!"Inscribe all human effort with one word,Artistry's haunting curse, the Incomplete!Being incomplete, my act escaped success.Easy to blame now! Every fool can swearTo hole in net that held and slipped the fish.But, treat my act with fair unjaundiced eye,What was there wanting to a masterpieceExcept the luck that lies beyond a man?My way with the woman, now proved grossly wrong,Just missed of being gravely grandly rightAnd making mouths laugh on the other side.Do, for the poor obstructed artist's sake,Go with him over that spoiled work once more!Take only its first flower, the ended actNow in the dusty pod, dry and defunct!I march to the Villa, and my men with me,That evening, and we reach the door and stand.I say … no, it shoots through me lightning-likeWhile I pause, breathe, my hand upon the latch,"Let me forebode! Thus far, too much success:"I want the natural failure—find it where?"Which thread will have to break and leave a loop"I' the meshy combination, my brain's loom"Wove this long while, and now next minute tests?"Of three that are to catch, two should go free,"One must: all three surprised,—impossible!"Beside, I seek three and may chance on six,—"This neighbour, t' other gossip,—the babe's birth"Brings such to fireside, and folks give them wine,—"'T is late: but when I break in presently"One will be found outlingering the rest"For promise of a posset,—one whose shout"Would raise the dead down in the catacombs,"Much more the city-watch that goes its round."When did I ever turn adroitly up"To sun some brick embedded in the soil,"And with one blow crush all three scorpions there?"Or Pietro or Violante shambles off—"It cannot be but I surprise my wife—"If only she is stopped and stamped on, good!"That shall suffice: more is improbable."Now I may knock!" And this once for my sakeThe impossible was effected: I called king,Queen and knave in a sequence, and cards came,All three, three only! So, I had my way,Did my deed: so, unbrokenly lay bareEach tænia that had sucked me dry of juice,At last outside me, not an inch of ringLeft now to writhe about and root itselfI' the heart all powerless for revenge! HenceforthI might thrive: these were drawn and dead and damnedOh Cardinal, the deep long sigh you heaveWhen the load's off you, ringing as it runsAll the way down the serpent-stair to hell!No doubt the fine delirium flustered me,Turned my brain with the influx of successAs if the sole need now were to wave wandAnd find doors fly wide,—wish and have my will,—The rest o' the scheme would care for itself: escapeEasy enough were that, and poor beside!It all but proved so,—ought to quite have proved,Since, half the chances had sufficed, set freeAnyone, with his senses at command,From thrice the danger of my flight. But, drunk,Redundantly triumphant,—some reverseWas sure to follow! There's no other wayAccounts for such prompt perfect failure thenAnd there on the instant. Any day o' the week,A ducat slid discreetly into palmO' the mute post-master, while you whisper him—How you the Count and certain four your knaves,Have just been mauling who was malapert,Suspect the kindred may prove troublesome,Therefore, want horses in a hurry,—thatAnd nothing more secures you any dayThe pick o' the stable! Yet I try the trick,Double the bribe, call myself Duke for Count,And say the dead man only was a Jew,And for my pains find I am dealing justWith the one scrupulous fellow in all Rome—Just this immaculate official stares,Sees I want hat on head and sword in sheath,Am splashed with other sort of wet than wine,Shrugs shoulder, puts my hand by, gold and all,Stands on the strictness of the rule o' the road!"Where's the Permission?" Where's the wretched ragWith the due seal and sign of Rome's Police,To be had for asking, half-an-hour ago?"Gone? Get another, or no horses hence!"He dares not stop me, we five glare too grim,But hinders,—hacks and hamstrings sure enough,Gives me some twenty miles of miry roadMore to march in the middle of that nightWhereof the rough beginning taxed the strengthO' the youngsters, much more mine, both soul and flesh,Who had to think as well as act: dead-beat,We gave in ere we reached the boundaryAnd safe spot out of this irrational Rome,—Where, on dismounting from our steeds next day,We had snapped our fingers at you, safe and sound,Tuscans once more in blessed Tuscany,Where laws make wise allowance, understandCivilized life and do its champions right!Witness the sentence of the Rota there,Arezzo uttered, the Granduke confirmed,One week before I acted on its hint,—Giving friend Guillichini, for his love,The galleys, and my wife your saint, Rome's saint,—Rome manufactures saints enough to know,—Seclusion at the Stinche for her life.All this, that all but was, might all have been,Yet was not! baulked by just a scrupulous knaveWhose palm was horn through handling horses' hoofsAnd could not close upon my proffered gold!What say you to the spite of fortune? Well,The worst's in store: thus hindered, haled this wayTo Rome again by hangdogs, whom find IHere, still to fight with, but my pale frail wife?—Riddled with wounds by one not like to wasteThe blows he dealt,—knowing anatomy,—(I think I told you) bound to pick and chooseThe vital parts! 'T was learning all in vain!She too must shimmer through the gloom o' the grave,Come and confront me—not at judgment-seatWhere I could twist her soul, as erst her flesh,And turn her truth into a lie,—but there,O' the death-bed, with God's hand between us both,Striking me dumb, and helping her to speak,Tell her own story her own way, and turnMy plausibility to nothingness!Four whole days did Pompilia keep alive,With the best surgery of Rome agapeAt the miracle,—this cut, the other slash,And yet the life refusing to dislodge,Four whole extravagant impossible days,Till she had time to finish and persuadeEvery man, every woman, every childIn Rome, of what she would: the selfsame sheWho, but a year ago, had wrung her hands,Reddened her eyes and beat her breasts, rehearsedThe whole game at Arezzo, nor availedThereby to move one heart or raise one hand!When destiny intends you cards like these,What good of skill and preconcerted play?Had she been found dead, as I left her dead,I should have told a tale brooked no reply:You scarcely will suppose me found at faultWith that advantage! "What brings me to Rome?"Necessity to claim and take my wife:"Better, to claim and take my new born babe,—"Strong in paternity a fortnight old,"When't is at strongest: warily I work,"Knowing the machinations of my foe;"I have companionship and use the night:"I seek my wife and child,—I find—no child"But wife, in the embraces of that priest"Who caused her to elope from me. These two,"Backed by the pander-pair who watch the while,"Spring on me like so many tiger-cats,"Glad of the chance to end the intruder. I—"What should I do but stand on my defence,"Strike right, strike left, strike thick and threefold, slay,"Not all-because the coward priest escapes."Last, I escape, in fear of evil tongues,"And having had my taste of Roman law."What's disputable, refutable here?—Save by just this one ghost-thing half on earth,Half out of it,—as if she held God's handWhile she leant back and looked her last at me,Forgiving me (here monks begin to weep)Oh, from her very soul, commending mineTo heavenly mercies which are infinite,—While fixing fast my head beneath your knife!'T is fate not fortune. All is of a piece!When was it chance informed me of my youths?My rustic four o' the family, soft swains,What sweet surprise had they in store for me,Those of my very household,—what did LawTwist with her rack-and-cord-contrivance lateFrom out their bones and marrow? What but this—Had no one of these several stumbling-blocksStopped me, they yet were cherishing a scheme,All of their honest country homespun wit,To quietly next day at crow of cockCut my own throat too, for their own behoof,Seeing I had forgot to clear accountsO' the instant, nowise slackened speed for that,—And somehow never might find memory,Once safe back in Arezzo, where things change,And a court-lord needs mind no country lout.Well, being the arch-offender, I die last,—May, ere my head falls, have my eyesight free,Nor miss them dangling high on either hand,Like scarecrows in a hemp-field, for their pains!

And then my Trial,—'t is my Trial that bitesLike a corrosive, so the cards are packed,Dice loaded, and my life-stake tricked away!Look at my lawyers, lacked they grace of law,Latin or logic? Were not they fools to the height,Fools to the depth, fools to the level between,O' the foolishness set to decide the case?They feign, they flatter; nowise does it skill,Everything goes against me: deal each judgeHis dole of flattery and feigning,—why,He turns and tries and snuffs and savours it,As some old fly the sugar-grain, your gift;Then eyes your thumb and finger, brushes cleanThe absurd old head of him, and whisks away,Leaving your thumb and finger dirty. Faugh!

And finally, after this long-drawn rangeOf affront and failure, failure and affront,—This path, 'twixt crosses leading to a skull,Paced by me barefoot, bloodied by my palmsFrom the entry to the end,—there's light at length,A cranny of escape: appeal may beTo the old man, to the father, to the Pope,For a little life—from one whose life is spent,A little pity—from pity's source and seat,A little indulgence to rank, privilege,From one who is the thing personified,Rank, privilege, indulgence, grown beyondEarth's bearing, even, ask Jansenius else!Still the same answer, still no other tuneFrom the cicala perched at the tree-topThan crickets noisy round the root: 't is "Die!"Bids Law—"Be damned!" adds Gospel,—nay,No word so frank,—'t is rather, "Save yourself!"The Pope subjoins—"Confess and be absolved!"So shall my credit countervail your shame,"And the world see I have not lost the knack"Of trying all the spirits: yours, my son,"Wants but a fiery washing to emerge"In clarity! Come, cleanse you, ease the ache"Of these old bones, refresh our bowels, boy!"Do I mistake your mission from the Pope?Then, bear his Holiness the mind of me!I do get strength from being thrust to wall,Successively wrenched from pillar and from postBy this tenacious hate of fortune, hateOf all things in, under, and above earth.Warfare, begun this mean unmanly mode,Does best to end so,—gives earth spectacleOf a brave fighter who succumbs to oddsThat turn defeat to victory. Stab, I foldMy mantle round me! Rome approves my act:Applauds the blow which costs me life but keepsMy honour spotless: Rome would praise no moreHad I fallen, say, some fifteen years ago,Helping Vienna when our AretinesFlocked to Duke Charles and fought Turk Mustafa;Nor would you two be trembling o'er my corpseWith all this exquisite solicitude.Why is it that I make such suit to live?The popular sympathy that's round me nowWould break like bubble that o'er-domes a fly:Solid enough while he lies quiet there,But let him want the air and ply the wing,Why, it breaks and bespatters him, what else?Cardinal, if the Pope had pardoned me,And I walked out of prison through the crowd,It would not be your arm I should dare press!Then, if I got safe to my place again,How sad and sapless were the years to come!I go my old ways and find things grown grey;You priests leer at me, old friends look askanceThe mob's in love, I'll wager, to a man,With my poor young good beauteous murdered wife:For hearts require instruction how to beat,And eyes, on warrant of the story, waxWanton at portraiture in white and blackOf dead Pompilia gracing ballad-sheet,Which eyes, lived she unmurdered and unsung,Would never turn though she paced street as bareAs the mad penitent ladies do in France.My brothers quietly would edge me outOf use and management of things called mine;Do I command? "You stretched command before!Show anger? "Anger little helped you once!"Advise? "How managed you affairs of old?"My very mother, all the while they gird,Turns eye up, gives confirmatory groan;For unsuccess, explain it how you will,Disqualifies you, makes you doubt yourself,—Much more, is found decisive by your friends.Beside, am I not fifty years of age?What new leap would a life take, checked like mineI' the spring at outset? Where's my second chance?Ay, but the babe … I had forgot my son,My heir! Now for a burst of gratitude!There's some appropriate service to intone,Some gaudeamus and thanksgiving psalm!Old, I renew my youth in him, and poorPossess a treasure,—is not that the phrase?Only I must wait patient twenty years—Nourishing all the while, as father ought,The excrescence with my daily blood of life.Does it respond to hope, such sacrifice,—Grows the wen plump while I myself grow lean?Why, here's my son and heir in evidence,Who stronger, wiser, handsomer than IBy fifty years, relieves me of each load,—Tames my hot horse, carries my heavy gun,Courts my coy mistress,—has his apt adviceOn house-economy, expenditure,And what not? All which good gifts and great growthBecause of my decline, he brings to bearOn Guido, but half apprehensive howHe cumbers earth, crosses the brisk young Count,Who civilly would thrust him from the scene.Contrariwise, does the blood-offering fail?There's an ineptitude, one blank the moreAdded to earth in semblance of my child?Then, this has been a costly piece of work,My life exchanged for his!—why he, not I,Enjoy the world, if no more grace accrue?Dwarf me, what giant have you made of him?I do not dread the disobedient son:I know how to suppress rebellion there,Being not quite the fool my father was.But grant the medium measure of a man,The usual compromise 'twixt fool and sage,—You know—the tolerably-obstinate,The not-so-much-perverse but you may train,The true son-servant that, when parent bids"Go work, son, in my vineyard!" makes reply"I go, Sir!"—Why, what profit in your sonBeyond the drudges you might subsidize,Have the same work from, at a paul the head?Look at those four young precious olive-plantsReared at Vittiano,—not on flesh and blood,These twenty years, but black bread and sour wine!I bade them put forth tender branch, hook, hold,And hurt three enemies I had in Rome:They did my hest as unreluctantly,At promise of a dollar, as a sonAdjured by mumping memories of the past.No, nothing repays youth expended so—Youth, I say, who am young still: grant but leaveTo live my life out, to the last I'd liveAnd die conceding age no right of youth!It is the will runs the renewing nerveThrough flaccid flesh that faints before the time.Therefore no sort of use for son have I—Sick, not of life's feast but of steps to climbTo the house where life prepares her feast,—of meansTo the end: for make the end attainableWithout the means,—my relish were like yours.A man may have an appetite enoughFor a whole dish of robins ready cooked,And yet lack courage to face sleet, pad snow,And snare sufficiently for supper.

ThusThe time's arrived when, ancient Roman-like,I am bound to fall on my own sword: why notSay—Tuscan-like, more ancient, better still?Will you hear truth can do no harm nor good?I think I never was at any timeA Christian, as you nickname all the world,Me among others: truce to nonsense now!Name me, a primitive religionist—As should the aboriginary beI boast myself, Etruscan, Aretine,One sprung,—your frigid Virgil's fieriest word,—From fauns and nymphs, trunks and the heart of oak,With,—for a visible divinity,—The portent of a Jove ÆgiochusDescried 'mid clouds, lightning and thunder, couchedOn topmost crag of your Capitoline:'T is in the Seventh Æneid,—what, the Eighth?Right,—thanks, Abate,—though the Christian's dumb,The Latinist's vivacious in you yet!I know my grandsire had our tapestryMarked with the motto, 'neath a certain shield,Whereto his grandson presently will give gulesTo vary azure. First we fight for faiths,But get to shake hands at the last of all:Mine's your faith too,—in Jove Ægiochus!Nor do Greek gods, that serve as supplement,Jar with the simpler scheme, if understood.We want such intermediary raceTo make communication possible;The real thing were too lofty, we too low,Midway hang these: we feel their use so plainIn linking height to depth, that we doff hatAnd put no question nor pry narrowlyInto the nature hid behind the names.We grudge no rite the fancy may demand;But never, more than needs, invent, refine,Improve upon requirement, idly wiseBeyond the letter, teaching gods their trade,Which is to teach us: we'll obey when taught.Why should we do our duty past the need?When the sky darkens, Jove is wroth,—say prayer!When the sun shines and Jove is glad,—sing psalm!But wherefore pass prescription and deviseBlood-offering for sweat-service, lend the rodA pungency through pickle of our own?Learned Abate,—no one teaches youWhat Venus means and who's Apollo here!I spare you, Cardinal,—but, though you wince,You know me, I know you, and both know that!So, if Apollo bids us fast, we fast:But where does Venus order we stop senseWhen Master Pietro rhymes a pleasantry?Give alms prescribed on Friday: but, hold handBecause your foe lies prostrate,—where's the wordExplicit in the book debars revenge?The rationale of your scheme is just"Pay toll here, there pursue your pleasure free!"So do you turn to use the medium-powers,Mars and Minerva, Bacchus and the rest,And so are saved propitiating—whom?What all-good, all-wise and all-potent JoveVexed by the very sins in man, himselfMade life's necessity when man he made?Irrational bunglers! So, the living truthRevealed to strike Pan dead, ducks low at last,Prays leave to hold its own and live good daysProvided it go masque grotesquely, calledChristian not Pagan. Oh, you purged the skyOf all gods save the One, the great and good,Clapped hands and triumphed! But the change came fast:The inexorable need in man for life—(Life, you may mulct and minish to a grainOut of the lump, so that the grain but live)Laughed at your substituting death for life,And bade you do your worst: which worst was doneIn just that age styled primitive and pureWhen Saint this, Saint that, dutifully starved,Froze, fought with beasts, was beaten and abusedAnd finally ridded of his flesh by fire:He kept life-long unspotted from the world!Next age, how goes the game, what mortal givesHis life and emulates Saint that, Saint this?Men mutter, make excuse or mutiny,In fine are minded all to leave the new,Stick to the old,—enjoy old liberty,No prejudice in enjoyment, if you please,To the new profession: sin o' the sly, henceforth!The law stands though the letter kills: what then?The spirit saves as unmistakeably.Omniscience sees, Omnipotence could stop,Omnibenevolence pardons: it must be,Frown law its fiercest, there's a wink somewhere!

Such was the logic in this head of mine:I, like the rest, wrote "poison" on my bread,But broke and ate:—said "Those that use the sword"Shall perish by the same;" then stabbed my foe.I stand on solid earth, not empty air:Dislodge me, let your Pope's crook hale me hence!Not he, nor you! And I so pity both,I'll make the true charge you want wit to make:"Count Guido, who reveal our mystery,"And trace all issues to the love of life."We having life to love and guard, like you,"Why did you put us upon self-defence?"You well knew what prompt pass-word would appease"The sentry's ire when folk infringed his bounds,"And yet kept mouth shut: do you wonder then"If, in mere decency, he shot you dead?"He can't have people play such pranks as yours"Beneath his nose at noonday: you disdained"To give him an excuse before the world"By crying 'I break rule to save our camp!'"Under the old rule, such offence were death;"And you had heard the Pontifex pronounce"'Since you slay foe and violate the form,"'Slaying turns murder, which were sacrifice"'Had you, while, say, law-suiting foe to death,"'But raised an altar to the Unknown God"'Or else the Genius of the Vatican.'"Why then this pother?—all because the Pope,"Doing his duty, cried 'A foreigner,"'You scandalize the natives: here at Rome"'Romano vivitur more: wise men, here,"'Put the Church forward and efface themselves."'The fit defence had been,—you stamped on wheat,"'Intending all the time to trample tares,—"'Were fain extirpate, then, the heretic,"'You now find, in your haste was slain a fool:"'Nor Pietro, nor Violante, nor your wife"'Meant to breed up your babe a Molinist!"'Whence you are duly contrite. Not one word"'Of all this wisdom did you urge: which slip"'Death must atone for.'"

So, let death atone!So ends mistake, so end mistakers!—endPerhaps to recommence,—how should I know?Only, be sure, no punishment, no painChildish, preposterous, impossible,But some such fate as Ovid could foresee,—Byblis in fluvium, let the weak soul endIn water, sed Lycaon in lupum, butThe strong become a wolf for evermore!Change that Pompilia to a puny streamFit to reflect the daisies on its bank!Let me turn wolf, be whole, and sate, for once,—Wallow in what is now a wolfishnessCoerced too much by the humanityThat's half of me as well! Grow out of man,Glut the wolf-nature,—what remains but growInto the man again, be man indeedAnd all man? Do I ring the changes right?Deformed, transformed, reformed, informed, conformed!The honest instinct, pent and crossed through life,Let surge by death into a visible flowOf rapture: as the strangled thread of flamePainfully winds, annoying and annoyed,Malignant and maligned, thro' stone and ore,Till earth exclude the stranger: vented once,It finds full play, is recognized a-topSome mountain as no such abnormal birthFire for the mount, the streamlet for the vale!Ay, of the water was that wife of mine—Be it for good, be it for ill, no runO' the red thread through that insignificance!Again, how she is at me with those eyes!Away with the empty stare! Be holy still,And stupid ever! Occupy your patchOf private snow that's somewhere in what worldMay now be growing icy round your head,And aguish at your foot-print,—freeze not me,Dare follow not another step I take,Not with so much as those detested eyes,No, though they follow but to pray me pauseOn the incline, earth's edge that's next to hell!None of your abnegation of revenge!Fly at me frank, tug while I tear again!There's God, go tell Him, testify your worst!Not she! There was no touch in her of hate:And it would prove her hell, if I reached mine!To know I suffered, would still sadden her,Do what the angels might to make amends!Therefore there's either no such place as hell,Or thence shall I be thrust forth, for her sake,And thereby undergo three hells, not one—I who, with outlet for escape to heaven,Would tarry if such flight allowed my foeTo raise his head, relieved of that firm footHad pinned him to the fiery pavement else!So am I made, "who did not make myself:"(How dared she rob my own lip of the word?)Beware me in what other world may be!—Pompilia, who have brought me to this pass!All I know here, will I say there, and goBeyond the saying with the deed. Some useThere cannot but be for a mood like mine,Implacable, persistent in revenge.She maundered "All is over and at end:"I go my own road, go you where God will!"Forgive you? I forget you!" There's the saintThat takes your taste, you other kind of men!How you had loved her! Guido wanted skillTo value such a woman at her worth!Properly the instructed criticize"What's here, you simpleton have tossed to take"Its chance i' the gutter? This a daub, indeed?"Why, 't is a Rafael that you kicked to rags!"Perhaps so: some prefer the pure design:Give me my gorge of colour, glut of goldIn a glory round the Virgin made for me!Titian 's the man, not Monk AngelicoWho traces you some timid chalky ghostThat turns the church into a charnel: ay,Just such a pencil might depict my wife!She,—since she, also, would not change herself,—Why could not she come in some heart-shaped cloud,Rainbowed about with riches, royaltyRimming her round, as round the tintless lawnGuardingly runs the selvage cloth of gold?I would have left the faint fine gauze untouched,Needle-worked over with its lily and rose,Let her bleach unmolested in the midstChill that selected solitary spotOf quietude she pleased to think was life.Purity, pallor grace the lawn no doubtWhen there's the costly bordure to unthreadAnd make again an ingot: but what's graceWhen you want meat and drink and clothes and fire?A tale comes to my mind that's apposite—Possibly true, probably false, a truthSuch as all truths we live by, Cardinal!'T is said, a certain ancestor of mineFollowed—whoever was the potentate,To Paynimrie, and in some battle, brokeThrough more than due allowance of the foe,And, risking much his own life, saved the lord's.Battered and bruised, the Emperor scrambles up,Rubs his eyes and looks round and sees my sire,Picks a furze-sprig from out his hauberk-joint,(Token how near the ground went majesty)And says "Take this, and if thou get safe home,"Plant the same in thy garden-ground to grow:"Run thence an hour in a straight line, and stop:"Describe a circle round (for central point)"The furze aforesaid, reaching every way"The length of that hour's run: I give it thee,—"The central point, to build a castle there,"The space circumjacent, for fit demesne,"The whole to be thy children's heritage,—"Whom, for thy sake, bid thou wear furze on cap!"Those are my arms: we turned the furze a treeTo show more, and the greyhound tied thereto,Straining to start, means swift and greedy both;He stands upon a triple mount of gold—By Jove, then, he's escaping from true goldAnd trying to arrive at empty air!Aha! the fancy never crossed my mind!My father used to tell me, and subjoin"As for the castle, that took wings and flew:"The broad lands,—why, to traverse them to day"Scarce tasks my gouty feet, and in my prime"I doubt not I could stand and spit so far:"But for the furze, boy, fear no lack of that,"So long as fortune leaves one field to grub!"Wherefore, hurra for furze and loyalty!"What may I mean, where may the lesson lurk?"Do not bestow on man, by way of gift,"Furze without land for framework,—vaunt no grace"Of purity, no furze-sprig of a wife,"To me, i' the thick of battle for my bread,"Without some better dowry,—gold will do!"No better gift than sordid muck? Yes, Sirs!Many more gifts much better. Give them me!O those Olimpias bold, those Biancas brave,That brought a husband power worth Ormuz' wealth!Cried "Thou being mine, why, what but thine am I?"Be thou to me law, right, wrong, heaven and hell!"Let us blend souls, blent, thou in me, to bid"Two bodies work one pleasure! What are these"Called king, priest, father, mother, stranger, friend?"They fret thee or they frustrate? Give the word—"Be certain they shall frustrate nothing more!"And who is this young florid foolishness"That holds thy ortune in his pigmy clutch,"—Being a prince and potency, forsooth!—"He hesitates to let the trifle go?"Let me but seal up eye, sing ear to sleep"Sounder than Samson,—pounce thou on the prize"Shall slip from off my breast, and down couchside,"And on to floor, and far as my lord's feet—"Where he stands in the shadow with the knife,"Waiting to see what Delilah dares do!"Is the youth fair? What is a man to me"Who am thy call-bird? Twist his neck—my dupe's,—"Then take the breast shall turn a breast indeed!"Such women are there; and they marry whom?Why, when a man has gone and hanged himselfBecause of what he calls a wicked wife,—See, if the very turpitude bemoanedProve not mere excellence the fool ignores!His monster is perfection,—Circe, sentStraight from the sun, with wand the idiot blamesAs not an honest distaff to spin wool!O thou Lucrezia, is it long to waitYonder where all the gloom is in a glowWith thy suspected presence?—virgin yet,Virtuous again, in face of what's to teach—Sin unimagined, unimaginable,—I come to claim my bride,—thy Borgia's selfNot half the burning bridegroom I shall be!Cardinal, take away your crucifix!Abate, leave my lips alone,—they bite!Vainly you try to change what should not change,And shall not. I have bared, you bathe my heart—It grows the stonier for your saving dew!You steep the substance, you would lubricate,In waters that but touch to petrify!

You too are petrifactions of a kind:Move not a muscle that shows mercy. RaveAnother twelve hours, every word were waste!I thought you would not slay impenitence,But teased, from men you slew, contrition first,—I thought you had a conscience. Cardinal,You know I am wronged!—wronged, say, and wronged, maintain.Was this strict inquisition made for bloodWhen first you showed us scarlet on your back,Called to the College? Your straightforward wayTo your legitimate end,—I think it passedOver a scantling of heads brained, hearts broke,Lives trodden into dust! How otherwise?Such was the way o' the world, and so you walked.Does memory haunt your pillow? Not a whit.God wills you never pace your garden-path,One appetizing hour ere dinner-time,But your intrusion there treads out of lifeA universe of happy innocent things:Feel you remorse about that damsel-flyWhich buzzed so near your mouth and flapped your face?You blotted it from being at a blow:It was a fly, you were a man, and more,Lord of created things, so took your course.Manliness, mind,—these are things fit to save,Fit to brush fly from: why, because I takeMy course, must needs the Pope kill me?—kill you!You! for this instrument, he throws away,Is strong to serve a master, and were yoursTo have and hold and get much good from out!The Pope who dooms me needs must die next year;I'll tell you how the chances are supposedFor his successor: first the Chamberlain,Old San Cesario,—Colloredo, next,—Then, one, two, three, four, I refuse to name;After these, comes Altieri; then come you—Seventh on the list you come, unless … ha, ha,How can a dead hand give a friend a lift?Are you the person to despise the helpO' the head shall drop in pannier presently?So a child seesaws on or kicks awayThe fulcrum-stone that's all the sage requiresTo fit his lever to and move the world.Cardinal, I adjure you in God's name,Save my life, fall at the Pope's feet, set forthThings your own fashion, not in words like theseMade for a sense like yours who apprehend!Translate into the Court-conventionalCount Guido must not die, is innocent!"Fair, be assured! But what an he were foul,"Blood-drenched and murder-crusted head to foot?"Spare one whose death insults the Emperor,"Nay, outrages the Louis you so love!"He has friends who will avenge him; enemies"Who will hate God now with impunity,"Missing the old coercive: would you send"A soul straight to perdition, dying frank"An atheist?" Go and say this, for God's sake!—Why, you don't think I hope you'll say one word?Neither shall I persuade you from your standNor you persuade me from my station: takeYour crucifix away, I tell you twice!

Come, I am tired of silence! Pause enough!You have prayed: I have gone inside my soulAnd shut its door behind me: 't is your torchMakes the place dark: the darkness let aloneGrows tolerable twilight: one may gropeAnd get to guess at length and breadth and depth.What is this fact I feel persuaded of—This something like a foothold in the sea,Although Saint Peter's bark scuds, billow-borne,Leaves me to founder where it flung me first?Spite of your splashing, I am high and dry!God takes his own part in each thing He made;Made for a reason, He conserves his work,Gives each its proper instinct of defence.My lamblike wife could neither bark nor bite,She bleated, bleated, till for pity pureThe village roused up, ran with pole and prongTo the rescue, and behold the wolf's at bay!Shall he try bleating?—or take turn or two,Since the wolf owns some kinship with the fox,And, failing to escape the foe by craft,Give up attempt, die fighting quietly?The last bad blow that strikes fire in at eyeAnd on to brain, and so out, life and all,How can it but be cheated of a pangIf, fighting quietly, the jaws enjoyOne re-embrace in mid back-bone they break,After their weary work thro' the foe's flesh?That's the wolf-nature. Don't mistake my trope!A Cardinal so qualmish? Eminence,My fight is figurative, blows i' the air,Brain-war with powers and principalities,Spirit-bravado, no real fisticuffs!I shall not presently, when the knock comes,Cling to this bench nor claw the hangman's face,No, trust me! I conceive worse lots than mine.Whether it be, the old contagious fitAnd plague o' the prison have surprised me too,The appropriate drunkenness of the death-hourCrept on my sense, kind work o' the wine and myrrh,—I know not,—I begin to taste my strength,Careless, gay even. What's the worth of life?The Pope's dead now, my murderous old man,For Tozzi told me so: and you, forsooth—Why, you don't think, Abate, do your best,You'll live a year more with that hacking coughAnd blotch of crimson where the cheek's a pit?Tozzi has got you also down in book!Cardinal, only seventh of seventy near,Is not one called Albano in the lot?Go eat your heart, you'll never be a Pope!Inform me, is it true you left your love,A Pucci, for promotion in the church?She's more than in the church,—in the churchyard!Plautilla Pucci, your affianced bride,Has dust now in the eyes that held the love,—And Martinez, suppose they make you Pope,Stops that with veto,—so, enjoy yourself!I see you all reel to the rock, you waves—Some forthright, some describe a sinuous track,Some, crested brilliantly, with heads above,Some in a strangled swirl sunk who knows how,But all bound whither the main-current sets,Rockward, an end in foam for all of you!What if I be o'ertaken, pushed to the frontBy all you crowding smoother souls behind,And reach, a minute sooner than was meant,The boundary whereon I break to mist?Go to! the smoothest safest of you all,Most perfect and compact wave in my train,Spite of the blue tranquillity above,Spite of the breadth before of lapsing peace,Where broods the halcyon and the fish leaps free,Will presently begin to feel the prickAt lazy heart, the push at torpid brain,Will rock vertiginously in turn, and reel,And, emulative, rush to death like me.Later or sooner by a minute then,So much for the untimeliness of death!And, as regards the manner that offends,The rude and rough, I count the same for gain.Be the act harsh and quick! UndoubtedlyThe soul's condensed and, twice itself, expandsTo burst thro' life, by alternation due,Into the other state whate'er it prove.You never know what life means till you die:Even throughout life, 't is death that makes life live,Gives it whatever the significance.For see, on your own ground and argument,Suppose life had no death to fear, how findA possibility of noblenessIn man, prevented daring any more?What's love, what's faith without a worst to dread?Lack-lustre jewelry! but faith and loveWith death behind them bidding do or die—Put such a foil at back, the sparkle's born!From out myself how the strange colours come!Is there a new rule in another world?Be sure I shall resign myself: as hereI recognized no law I could not see,There, what I see, I shall acknowledge too:On earth I never took the Pope for God,In heaven I shall scarce take God for the Pope.Unmanned, remanned: I hold it probable—With something changeless at the heart of meTo know me by, some nucleus that's myself:Accretions did it wrong? Away with them—You soon shall see the use of fire!

Till when,All that was, is; and must forever be.Nor is it in me to unhate my hates,—I use up my last strength to strike once moreOld Pietro in the wine-house-gossip-face,To trample underfoot the whine and wileOf beast Violante,—and I grow one gorgeTo loathingly reject Pompilia's palePoison my hasty hunger took for food.A strong tree wants no wreaths about its trunk,No cloying cups, no sickly sweet of scent,But sustenance at root, a bucketful.How else lived that Athenian who died so,Drinking hot bull's blood, fit for men like me?I lived and died a man, and take man's chance,Honest and bold: right will be done to such.

Who are these you have let descend my stair?Ha, their accursed psalm! Lights at the sill!Is it "Open" they dare bid you? Treachery!Sirs, have I spoken one word all this whileOut of the world of words I had to say?Not one word! All was folly—I laughed and mocked!Sirs, my first true word, all truth and no lie,Is—save me notwithstanding! Life is all!I was just stark mad,—let the madman livePressed by as many chains as you please pile!Don't open! Hold me from them! I am yours,I am the Granduke's—no, I am the Pope's!Abate,—Cardinal,—Christ,—Maria,—God, …Pompilia, will you let them murder me?

M'Fingal - Canto II

The Sun, who never stops to dine,Two hours had pass'd the mid-way line,And driving at his usual rate,Lash'd on his downward car of state.And now expired the short vacation,And dinner o'er in epic fashion,While all the crew, beneath the trees,Eat pocket-pies, or bread and cheese,(Nor shall we, like old Homer, careTo versify their bill of fare)Each active party, feasted well,Throng'd in, like sheep, at sound of bell;With equal spirit took their places,And meeting oped with three Oh Yesses:When first, the daring Whigs t' oppose,Again the great M'Fingal rose,Stretch'd magisterial arm amain,And thus resumed th' accusing strain.

"Ungrateful sons! a factious band,That rise against your parent land!Ye viper race, that burst in strifeThe genial womb that gave you life,Tear with sharp fangs and forked tongueThe indulgent bowels whence ye sprung;And scorn the debt and obligation,You justly owe the British nation,Which, since you cannot pay, your crewAffect to swear was never due.

"Did not the deeds of England's primateFirst drive your fathers to this climate,Whom jails and fines and every illForced to their good against their will?Ye owe to their obliging temperThe peopling your new-fangled empire,While every British act and canonStood forth your causa sine qua non.Who'd seen, except for these restraints,Your witches, quakers, whigs and saints,Or heard of Mather's famed Magnalia,If Charles and Laud had chanced to fail you?Did they not send your charters o'er,And give you lands you own'd before,Permit you all to spill your blood,And drive out heathens where you could;On these mild terms, that, conquest won,The realm you gain'd should be their own?And when of late attack'd by those,Whom her connection made your foes,Did they not then, distress'd by war,Send generals to your help from far,Whose aid you own'd, in terms less haughty,And thankfully o'erpaid your quota?Say, at what period did they grudgeTo send you Governor or Judge,With all their Missionary crew,To teach you law and gospel too?They brought all felons in the nationTo help you on in population;Proposed their Bishops to surrender,And made their Priests a legal tender,Who only ask'd, in surplice clad,The simple tithe of all you had:And now, to keep all knaves in awe,Have sent their troops t' establish law,And with gunpowder, fire and ball,Reform your people, one and all.Yet when their insolence and prideHave anger'd all the world beside;When fear and want at once invade,Can you refuse to lend them aid,And rather risk your heads in fight,Than gratefully throw in your mite?Can they for debts make satisfaction,Should they dispose their realm at auction,And sell off Britain's goods and land allTo France and Spain, by inch of candle?Shall good King George, with want oppress'd,Insert his name in bankrupt list,And shut up shop, like failing merchant,That fears the bailiffs should make search in't;With poverty shall princes strive,And nobles lack whereon to live?Have they not rack'd their whole inventionsTo feed their brats on posts and pensions;Made their Scotch friends with taxes groan,And pick'd poor Ireland to the bone:Yet have on hand, as well deserving,Ten thousand bastards, left for starving?And can you now, with conscience clear,Refuse them an asylum here,And not maintain, in manner fitting,These genuine sons of mother Britain?

"Your boasted patriotism is scarce,And country's love is but a farce:For after all the proofs you bring,We Tories know there's no such thing.Hath not Dalrymple show'd in print,And Johnson too, there's nothing in't;Produced you demonstration ample,From others' and their own example,That self is still, in either faction,The only principle of action;The loadstone, whose attracting tetherKeeps the politic world together:And spite of all your double dealing,We all are sure 'tis so, from feeling.

"Who heeds your babbling of transmittingFreedom to brats of your begetting,Or will proceed, as tho' there were a tie,And obligation to posterity?We get them, bear them, breed and nurse.What has posterity done for us,That we, least they their rights should lose,Should trust our necks to gripe of noose?

"And who believes you will not run?Ye're cowards, every mother's son;And if you offer to deny,We've witnesses to prove it by.Attend th' opinion first, as referee,Of your old general, stout Sir Jeffery;Who swore that with five thousand footHe'd rout you all, and in pursuitRun thro' the land, as easilyAs camel thro' a needle's eye?Did not the mighty Colonel GrantAgainst your courage pour his rant,Affirm your universal failureIn every principle of valour,And swear no scamperers e'er could match you,So swift, a bullet scarce could catch you?And will you not confess, in thisA judge most competent he is;Well skill'd on running to decide,As what himself has often tried?'Twould not methinks be labor lost,If you'd sit down and count the cost,And ere you call your Yankies out,First think what work you've set about.Have you not roused, his force to try on,That grim old beast, the British Lion:And know you not, that at a supHe's large enough to eat you up?Have you survey'd his jaws beneath,Drawn inventories of his teeth,Or have you weigh'd, in even balance,His strength and magnitude of talons?His roar would change your boasts to fear,As easily, as sour small beer;And make your feet from dreadful fray,By native instinct run away.Britain, depend on't, will take on herT' assert her dignity and honor,And ere she'd lose your share of pelf,Destroy your country, and herself.For has not North declared they fightTo gain substantial rev'nue by't,Denied he'd ever deign to treat,Till on your knees and at his feet?And feel you not a trifling agueFrom Van's "Delenda est Carthago?For this now Britain has projected,Think you she has not means t' effect it?Has she not set at work all enginesTo spirit up the native Indians,Send on your backs the tawney band,With each an hatchet in his hand,T' amuse themselves with scalping knives.And butcher children and your wives;And paid them for your scalps at saleMore than your heads would fetch by tale;That she might boast again with vanity,Her English national humanity?For now in its primeval senseThis term, humanity, comprehendsAll things of which, on this side hell,The human mind is capable;And thus 'tis well, by writers sage,Applied to Britain and to Gage.On this brave work to raise allies,She sent her duplicate of Guys,To drive at different parts at once on,Her stout Guy Carlton and Guy Johnson;To each of whom, to send again you,Old Guy of Warwick were a ninny,Though the dun cow he fell'd in war,These killcows are his betters far.

"And has she not essay'd her notesTo rouse your slaves to cut your throats;Sent o'er ambassadors with guineas,To bribe your blacks in Carolinas?And has not Gage, her missionary,Turn'd many an Afric to a Tory;Made the New-England Bishop's see grow,By many a new-converted negro?As friends to government, when heYour slaves at Boston late set free,Enlisted them in black parade,Emboss'd with regimental red;While flared the epaulette, like flambeau,On Captain Cuff and Ensign Sambo:And were they not accounted thenAmong his very bravest men?And when such means she stoops to take,Think you she is not wide awake?As the good man of old in JobOwn'd wondrous allies through the globe,Had brought the stones along the streetTo ratify a cov'nant meet,And every beast, from lice to lions,To join in leagues of strict alliance:Has she not cringed, in spite of pride,For like assistance, far and wide,Till all this formidable league roseOf Indians, British troops and Negroes?And can you break these triple bandsBy all your workmanship of hands?

"Sir," quoth Honorius, "we presumeYou guess from past feats what's to come,And from the mighty deeds of GageForetell how fierce the war he'll wage.You doubtless recollected hereThe annals of his first great year:While, wearying out the Tories' patience,He spent his breath in proclamations;While all his mighty noise and vapourWas used in wrangling upon paper,And boasted military fitsClosed in the straining of his wits;While troops, in Boston commons placed,Laid nought, but quires of paper, waste;While strokes alternate stunn'd the nation,Protest, Address and Proclamation,And speech met speech, fib clash'd with fib,And Gage still answer'd, squib for squib.

"Though this not all his time was lost on;He fortified the town of Boston,Built breastworks, that might lend assistanceTo keep the patriots at a distance;For howsoe'er the rogues might scoff,He liked them best the farthest off;Works of important use to aidHis courage, when he felt afraid,And whence right off, in manful station,He'd boldly pop his proclamation.Our hearts must in our bosoms freeze,At such heroic deeds as these."

"Vain," said the 'Squire, "you'll find to sneerAt Gage's first triumphant year;For Providence, disposed to teaze us,Can use what instruments it pleases.To pay a tax, at Peter's wish,His chief cashier was once a fish;An ass, in Balaam's sad disaster,Turn'd orator and saved his master;A goose, placed sentry on his station,Preserved old Rome from desolation;An English bishop's cur of lateDisclosed rebellions 'gainst the state;So frogs croak'd Pharaoh to repentance,And lice delay'd the fatal sentence:And heaven can ruin you at pleasure,By Gage, as soon as by a Cæsar.Yet did our hero in these daysPick up some laurel wreaths of praise.And as the statuary of SevilleMade his crackt saint an exc'llent devil;So though our war small triumph brings,We gain'd great fame in other things.

"Did not our troops show great discerning,And skill your various arts in learning?Outwent they not each native noodleBy far, in playing Yankee-doodle,Which as 'twas your New-England tune,'Twas marvellous they took so soon?And ere the year was fully through,Did not they learn to foot it too,And such a dance, as ne'er was known,For twenty miles on end lead down?Did they not lay their heads together,And gain your art to tar and feather,When Colonel Nesbit, thro' the town,In triumph bore the country-clown?Oh what a glorious work to singThe veteran troops of Britain's king,Adventuring for th' heroic laurelWith bag of feathers and tar-barrel!To paint the cart where culprits ride,And Nesbitt marching at its side,Great executioner and proud,Like hangman high on Holborn road;And o'er the slow-drawn rumbling car,The waving ensigns of the war!As when a triumph Rome decreedFor great Caligula's valiant deed,Who had subdued the British seas,By gath'ring cockles from their base;In pompous car the conq'ror boreHis captive scallops from the shore,Ovations gain'd his crabs for fetching,And mighty feats of oyster-catching:'Gainst Yankies thus the war begun,They tarr'd, and triumph'd over, one;And fought and boasted through the season,With force as great and equal reason.

"Yet thus though skill'd in vict'ry's toils,They boast, not unexpert, in wiles.For gain'd they not an equal fame inThe arts of secrecy and scheming;In stratagem show'd wondrous force,And modernized the Trojan horse,Play'd o'er again the tricks Ulyssean,In their famed Salem expedition?For as that horse, the poets tell ye,Bore Grecian armies in its belly,Till their full reckoning run, with joyShrewd Sinon midwived them in Troy:So in one ship was Leslie boldCramm'd with three hundred men in hold,Equipp'd for enterprize and sail,Like Jonas stow'd in womb of whale.To Marblehead in depth of nightThe cautious vessel wing'd her flight.And now the sabbath's silent dayCall'd all your Yankies off to pray;Safe from each prying jealous neighbour,The scheme and vessel fell in labor.Forth from its hollow womb pour'd hast'lyThe Myrmidons of Colonel Leslie.Not thicker o'er the blacken'd strand,The frogs detachment, rush'd to land,Furious by onset and surprizeTo storm th' entrenchment of the mice.Through Salem straight, without delay,The bold battalion took its way,March'd o'er a bridge, in open sightOf several Yankies arm'd for fight;Then without loss of time or men,Veer'd round for Boston back again,And found so well their projects thrive,That every soul got home alive.

"Thus Gage's arms did fortune blessWith triumph, safety and success.But mercy is without disputeHis first and darling attribute;So great, it far outwent and conquer'dHis military skill at Concord.There, when the war he chose to wage,Shone the benevolence of Gage;Sent troops to that ill-omen'd place,On errands mere of special grace;And all the work, he chose them for,Was to prevent a civil war;For which kind purpose he projectedThe only certain way t' effect it,To seize your powder, shot and arms,And all your means of doing harms;As prudent folks take knives away,Lest children cut themselves at play.And yet, when this was all his scheme,The war you still will charge on him;And tho' he oft has swore and said it,Stick close to facts, and give no credit.Think you, he wish'd you'd brave and beard him?Why, 'twas the very thing, that scared him.He'd rather you should all have run,Than staid to fire a single gun.So, for the civil war you lament,Faith, you yourselves must take the blame in't;For had you then, as he intended,Given up your arms, it must have ended:Since that's no war, each mortal knows,Where one side only gives the blows,And t'other bears them; on reflectionThe most we call it is correction.Nor could the contest have gone higher,If you had ne'er return'd the fire:But when you shot, and not before,It then commenced a civil war.Else Gage, to end this controversy,Had but corrected you in mercy;Whom mother Britain, old and wise,Sent o'er, the colonies to chastise;Command obedience on their perilOf ministerial whip and ferule;And since they ne'er must come of age,Govern'd and tutor'd them by Gage.Still more, that mercy was their errand,The army's conduct makes apparent.What though at Lexington you can say,They kill'd a few, they did not fancy;At Concord then with manful popping,Discharged a round, the ball to open;Yet when they saw your rebel routDetermined still to brave it out,Did they not show their love of peace,Their wish that discord straight might cease;Demonstrate, and by proofs uncommon,Their orders were to injure no man?For did not every regular run,As soon as e'er you fired a gun;Take the first shot you sent them, greeting,As meant their signal for retreating;And fearful, if they staid for sport,You might by accident be hurt,Convey themselves with speed awayFull twenty miles in half a day;Race till their legs were grown so weary,They scarce sufficed their weight to carry?Whence Gage extols, from general hearsay,The great activity of Lord Percy;Whose brave example led them on,And spirited the troops to run;Who now may boast, at royal levees,A Yankee-chace worth forty Chevys.

"Yet you, as vile as they were kind,Pursued, like tygers, still behind;Fired on them at your will, and shutThe town, as though you'd starve them out;And with parade preposterous hedged,Affect to hold them there besieged:Though Gage, whom proclamations callYour Gov'rnor and Vice-Admiral,Whose power gubernatorial stillExtends as far as Bunker's hill,Whose admiralty reaches, clever,Near half a mile up Mistic river,Whose naval force yet keeps the seas,Can run away whene'er he'd please.Nay, stern with rage grim Putnam boilingPlunder'd both Hogg and Noddle Island;Scared troops of Tories into town,Burn'd all their hay and houses down,And menaced Gage, unless he'd flee,To drive him headlong to the sea;As once, to faithless Jews a sign,The De'el, turn'd hog-reeve, did the swine.

"But now your triumphs all are o'er;For see from Britain's angry shore,With deadly hosts of valor joinHer Howe, her Clinton and Burgoyne!As comets thro' th' affrighted skiesPour baleful ruin as they rise;As Ætna with infernal roarIn conflagration sweeps the shore;Or as Abijah White, when sentOur Marshfield friends to represent,Himself while dread array involves,Commissions, pistols, swords, resolves,In awful pomp descending downBore terror on the factious town:Not with less glory and affright,Parade these generals forth to fight.No more each British colonel runsFrom whizzing beetles, as air-guns;Thinks horn-bugs bullets, or thro' fearsMuskitoes takes for musketeers;Nor scapes, as if you'd gain'd supplies,From Beelzebub's whole host of flies.No bug these warlike hearts appalls;They better know the sound of balls.I hear the din of battle bray;The trump of horror marks its way.I see afar the sack of cities,The gallows strung with Whig-committees;Your moderators triced, like vermin,And gate-posts graced with heads of chairmen;Your Congress for wave-off'rings hanging,And ladders throng'd with priests haranguing.What pillories glad the Tories' eyesWith patriot ears for sacrifice!What whipping-posts your chosen raceAdmit successive in embrace,While each bears off his sins, alack!Like Bunyan's pilgrim, on his back!Where then, when Tories scarce get clear,Shall Whigs and Congresses appear?What rocks and mountains will you callTo wrap you over with their fall,And save your heads, in these sad weathers,From fire and sword, and tar and feathers?For lo! with British troops tar-bright,Again our Nesbitt heaves in sight;He comes, he comes, your lines to storm,And rig your troops in uniform.To meet such heroes will ye brag,With fury arm'd, and feather-bag,Who wield their missile pitch and tarWith engines new in British war?

"Lo! where our mighty navy bringsDestruction on her canvass wings,While through the deep the British thunderShall sound th' alarm, to rob and plunder!As Phoebus first, so Homer speaks,When he march'd out t' attack the Greeks,'Gainst mules sent forth his arrows fatal,And slew th' auxiliaries, their cattle:So where our ships shall stretch the keel,What vanquish'd oxen shall they steal!What heroes, rising from the deep,Invade your marshall'd hosts of sheep;Disperse whole troops of horse, and pressing,Make cows surrender at discretion;Attack your hens, like Alexanders,And regiments rout of geese and ganders;Or where united arms combine,Lead captive many a herd of swine!Then rush in dreadful fury downTo fire on every seaport town;Display their glory and their wits,Fright helpless children into fits;And stoutly, from the unequal fray,Make many a woman run away.

"And can ye doubt, whene'er we please,Our chiefs shall boast such deeds as these?Have we not chiefs transcending farThe old famed thunderbolts of war;Beyond the brave knight-errant fighters,Stiled swords of death, by novel-writers;Nor in romancing ages e'er roseSo terrible a tier of heroes.From Gage what sounds alarm the waves!How loud a blunderbuss is Graves!How Newport dreads the blustering sallies,That thunder from our popgun, Wallace,While noise in formidable strains,Spouts from his thimble-full of brains!I see you sink in awed surprise!I see our Tory brethren rise!And as the sect'ries Sandemanian,Our friends, describe their hoped millennium;Boast how the world in every regionAt once shall own their true religion,For heaven shall knock, with vengeance dread,All unbelievers on the head;And then their church, the meek in spirit,The earth, as promised, shall inheritFrom the dead wicked, as heirs male,Or next remainder-men in tail:Such ruin shall the Whigs oppress;Such spoils our Tory friends shall bless:While Confiscation at commandShall stalk in terror through the land,Shall give all whig-estates away,And call our brethren into play.

"And can you pause, or scruple more?These things are near you, at the door.Behold! for though to reasoning blind,Signs of the times you still might mind,And view impending fate, as plainAs you'd foretell a shower of rain.

"Hath not heaven warn'd you what must ensue.And providence declared against you?Hung forth the dire portents of warBy fires and beacons in the air;Alarm'd old women all aroundWith fearful noises under ground,While earth, for many a hundred leagues,Groan'd with her dismal load of Whigs?Was there a meteor, far and wide,But muster'd on the Tory side;A star malign, that has not bentIts aspects for the parliament,Foreboding your defeat and misery,As once they fought against old Sisera?Was there a cloud, that spread the skies,But bore our armies of allies,While dreadful hosts of flame stood forthIn baleful streamers from the north?Which plainly show'd what part they join'd:For North's the minister, ye mind;Whence oft your quibblers in gazettesOn Northern blasts have strain'd their wits;And think you not, the clouds know howTo make the pun, as well you?Did there arise an apparition,But grinn'd forth ruin to sedition;A death-watch, but has join'd our leagues,And click'd destruction to the Whigs?Heard ye not, when the wind was fair,At night our prophets in the air,Who, loud, like admiralty libel,Read awful chapters from the Bible,And war and plague and death denounced,And told you how you'd soon be trounced?I see, to join our conq'ring side,Heaven, earth and hell at once allied;See from your overthrow and end,The Tory paradise ascend,Like that new world, which claims its station,Beyond the final conflagration.I see the day, that lots your shareIn utter darkness and despair;The day of joy, when North, our lord,His faithful fav'rites shall reward.No Tory then shall set before himSmall wish of 'Squire and Justice Quorum;But to his unmistaken eyesSee lordships, posts and pensions rise.

"'Tis well," Honorius cried; "your schemeHas painted out a pretty dream.We can't confute your second-sight;We shall be slaves and you a knight.These things must come, but I divine,They'll come not in your day, nor mine.

"But, oh my friends, my brethren, hear;And turn for once th' attentive ear.Ye see how prompt to aid our woesThe tender mercies of our foes;Ye see with what unvaried rancourStill for our blood their minions hanker;Nor aught can sate their mad ambition,From us, but death, or worse, submission.Shall these then riot in our spoil,Reap the glad harvest of our toil,Rise from their country's ruins proud,And roll their chariot-wheels in blood?See Gage, with inauspicious star,Has oped the gates of civil war,When streams of gore, from freemen slain,Encrimson'd Concord's fatal plain;Whose warning voice, with awful sound,Still cries, like Abel's, from the ground;And heaven, attentive to its call,Shall doom the proud oppressor's fall.

"And ye, whose souls of dastard mouldStart at the bravery of the bold;To love your country who pretend,Yet want all spirit to defend;Who feel your fancies so prolific,Engend'ring visions whims terrific,O'errun with horrors of coercion,Fire, blood and thunder in reversion;King's standards, pill'ries, confiscations,And Gage's scare-crow proclamations;Who scarce could rouse, if caught in fray,Presence of mind to run away;See nought but halters rise to view,In all your dreams, and deem them true;And while these phantoms haunt your brains,Bow down your willing necks to chains.Heavens! are ye sons of sires so great,Immortal in the fields of fate,Who braved all deaths, by land or sea,Who bled, who conquer'd, to be free?Hence coward souls, the worst disgraceOf our forefathers' valiant race;Hie homeward from the glorious field,There turn the wheel, the distaff wield;Act what ye are, nor dare to stainThe warrior's arms with touch profane;There beg your more heroic wivesTo guard your own, your children's, lives;Beneath their aprons seek a screen,Nor dare to mingle more with men."

As thus he spake, the Tories' angerCould now restrain itself no longer;Who tried before by many a freak, orInsulting noise, to stop the speaker;Swung th' un-oil'd hinge of each pew-door,Their feet kept shuffling on the floor;Made their disapprobation knownBy many a murmur, hum and groan,That to his speech supplied the placeOf counterpart in thorough bass.Thus bagpipes, while the tune they breathe,Still drone and grumble underneath;And thus the famed DemosthenesHarangued the rumbling of the seas,Held forth with elocution grave,To audience loud of wind and wave;And had a stiller congregation,Than Tories are, to hear th' oration.The uproar now grew high and louder,As nearer thund'rings of a cloud are,And every soul with heart and voiceSupplied his quota of the noise.Each listening ear was set on torture,Each Tory bellowing, "Order, Order;"And some, with tongue not low or weak,Were clam'ring fast, for leave to speak;The Moderator, with great vi'lence,The cushion thump'd with, "Silence, Silence!"The Constable to every praterBawl'd out, "Pray hear the moderator;"Some call'd the vote, and some in turnWere screaming high, "Adjourn, Adjourn."Not Chaos heard such jars and clashes,When all the el'ments fought for places.The storm each moment fiercer grew;His sword the great M'Fingal drew,Prepared in either chance to share,To keep the peace, or aid the war.Nor lack'd they each poetic being,Whom bards alone are skill'd in seeing;Plumed Victory stood perch'd on high,Upon the pulpit-canopy,To join, as is her custom tried,Like Indians, on the strongest side;The Destinies, with shears and distaff,Drew near their threads of life to twist off;The Furies 'gan to feast on blows,And broken head, and bloody nose:When on a sudden from withoutArose a loud terrific shout;And straight the people all at once heardOf tongues an universal concert;Like Æsop's times, as fable runs,When every creature talk'd at once,Or like the variegated gabble,That crazed the carpenters of Babel.Each party soon forsook the quarrel,And let the other go on parol,Eager to know what fearful matterHad conjured up such general clatter;And left the church in thin array,As though it had been lecture-day.Our 'Squire M'Fingal straitway beckon'dThe Constable to stand his second;And sallied forth with aspect fierceThe crowd assembled to disperse.

The Moderator, out of view,Beneath the desk had lain perdue;Peep'd up his head to view the fray,Beheld the wranglers run away,And left alone, with solemn faceAdjourn'd them without time or place.

When times are bad

When times are badand I am with my hands in my hairand black foreigners from all over Africaovernight becomes citizensand have more rights as a citizen than meand affirmative actionputs her claws into my lifethen I wonder about justiceand when merit and experiencewill ever again apply

where my ancestors Joost Strydomfrom Liefenshoek in the Netherlandsas a merchant seaman of the VOCin 1678 came to Cape Town,

married his pretty well know wifeMaryna Ras who with a horsecould alone ride days long to Cape Townwith whom noblemen tried to have relationships,

where the indigenous zulu-xhosa-pondo-swazi peopleare originating from a groupthat during the same timeimmigrated far away out of the northfrom eMbo at the big lakes in central Africaunder the leadership of Nguni and later Dlamini

and then I wonder howthis country rather belongs to themand they have to have work opportunities before me

and if you now say anythingabout the new migration out of the whole of Africafor which the country’s borders are now wide open(in such a way that South Africansmust now get visas for Great Britain) you are seen as xenophobic

and then there are citizens from right over Africawho become South Africans overnightattaining more rights than youwho forced by lawget secure job opportunities

and do people from Mozambique murderEugene Terreblance, drug dealers from Nigeriaare caught by the local police

while against your willyou were forced into an army, into a warstill faithfully pay your taxeswhen and where you have a job

and the current governmenttries to stay in powerwhile Aids devours its voter numbers

and you as a white manare despised by the current regime, are treaded into the groundwhile the country are falling to piecesand then you prayto Him (the God of the universe) who controls everythingto drastically intervenerather than rousing peoplefor a civil war.